Time To Put On The Sunglasses - THEY LIVE

Like horror movies, I like to have an appropriate theme when the holidays roll around.  While Inauguration Day isn’t exactly a holiday, it is an important event, so I wanted to pick a movie that exemplifies the specific mood.  My first thought was to go with something apocalyptic,  but I didn’t want to be so pessimistic.  Instead, I wanted something that more accurately reflected the challenges this new administration presents.  So I settled on John Carpenter’s 1988 political dissertation, THEY LIVE.  

Note: I try to be subtle with my opinions of our new President (except for here, and here, and here), but I must confess, this one isn’t going to be subtle.  If you are not a fan of heartfelt, half-baked commentary… why are you on this site?  That’s kind of my thing. If you are specifically not a fan of heartfelt, half-baked political commentary, you may only want to read the first half.  Go ahead and read the second half too, though.  You’re tough, you can take it.

The Capsule:

Nada (Roddy Piper), a down on his luck drifter, discovers that powerful forces in the government are deceiving and exploiting the American people for their own selfish gains.  Without realizing it, citizens are being bombarded with messages promoting apathy, social division, and unquestioning support of the traditional status quo.  Elite white businessmen and the super wealthy collaborate with the evil forces, getting richer while the middle class shrinks and the disadvantaged suffer.  Nada and his friend Frank (Keith David) join a grassroots resistance organization that has developed a way of seeing though the illusions and exposing the evil forces for what they are.  They have their work cut out for them, though, because the evil forces use their media platforms to publicly discredit the resistance and sanction an excessive police response to silence their enemies.  Nada and Frank have to fight their way to the highest levels of power if they have any hope of revealing the insidious plot against the American people.  Oh, did I mention that forces of evil are disgusting skull faced aliens with poofy ‘80s hair?

THEY LIVE is one of those movies that gets better with maturity.  I liked it when I first saw it in 1988, but I didn’t love it.  My favorite Carpenter movies at that point, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, THE THING, and BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, all got the action started immediately out of the gate.  THEY LIVE takes its time.  The lengthy opening is all about setting a dreary atmosphere of hopelessness and socio-economic disparity.  Carpenter waits a full thirty minutes before showing the first alien.  That’s a long while to wait when you're a kid, especially when the trailer is wall to wall with crazy ghoul faces.  

Coming back to it more than 20 years later, though, I found the opening to be dead-on perfect, right down to its bluesy, haunting soundtrack.  Carpenter gives us time to not only invest in the plight of the lead characters, but of everyone struggling to get along in the world.  Being an adult having to worry about money and a familyvcompletely changes everything.  Not all of us can relate to the kind of poverty and hardship faced by the squatter camp where Nada and Frank are staying, but we can at least imagine it.  Unless you are one of those snooty and condescending rich bastards like in the movie.  But fuck those guys, they aren’t the intended audience.  I doubt this is a very popular film with venture capitalists and hedge fund managers, anyway.  

Nothing defines my deep admiration of this movie more than Nada and Frank’s epic, five minute long back alley brawl.  Nada’s eyes have literally been opened to the aliens’ hidden messages of conformity by a special pair of illusion dispelling sunglasses.  The conflict comes when Nada, who has reacted violently to this new reality, wants Frank to put on the sunglasses, too.  Frank does not.  Being stubborn, stoic men, they begin a discourse with their fists.  It is a clumsy, unglamorous fight that looks very authentic (it mostly was, the actors only faked the face and groin shots) and goes on until both men are completely exhausted.  Even though I appreciated fisticuffs when I was younger, I remember wondering why Frank didn’t just put on the stupid glasses and get on with it.  

Watching it now, I totally get it.  Frank’s resistance isn’t just sheer stubbornness.  Nada is wanted for mass murder (according to the news) and he is going on about aliens that only he can see.  By all accounts, he is a complete nutjob.  In addition to not turning him in, Frank actually gives Nada money so he can leave town.  He’s gone far out of his way for a friend he just met a few days ago, now all he wants is to be out of it.  If Frank humors this lunatic, even for a second, he risks getting entangled in Nada’s delusions.  At best, it could get him in trouble with the cops, at worst it could get him killed.  The most sensible thing he can do is make a clean break.  If it has to be across Nada’s face, so be it. 

I would have done the same thing as Frank.  Except that the fight would have lasted about twenty seconds before I woke up with a pair of sunglasses over my eyes.  Keith David has a few pounds on me.

Once Nada realizes what is really happening, he says, “Figures it’d be something like this.”  It’s a great line, because, yes, that would explain a lot about why society is in such bad shape.  It also lets humanity off the hook...kind of. Greed still compels some assholes to willingly sell out their species.  It  offers up a convenient excuse why the rest of us accept the state of the world, though.  The reality is that we don’t need aliens with subliminal messages to dupe us down the wrong path.  

John Carpenter wrote the screenplay (adapted from a short story by Beat Generation writer Ray Nelson) as a comment on Reagan era politics.  In some ways, THEY LIVE is an inverse of politics today.   In other ways, it is sickeningly accurate.  In the movie, the working class sees through the lies of an organization that works against their interest.  In reality, the working class elects a con man working only for his interests.  It’s funny that Frank cynically explains the Golden Rule, “He who has the gold, makes the rules.”  This is a quote that Donald Trump has actually said (source: his Facebook page).  He’s wasn’t being cynical.  

Trump’s secret message isn’t “Don’t Question Authority”, it’s “Don’t Question What You Want to Hear”.  He is an absolute master of manipulating the confirmation bias, when people tend to put more weight on statements that match what they believe while ignoring contradictory information.  We are all susceptible to it, but even in the political world, it’s rarely used with such blunt, calculating, and effortless impact as with Trump.  He is so good at it that he can make an indisputable lie, like “No one respects women more than I do,” (said on national television after his “grab them by the pussy” scandal) seem reasonable to his most ardent supporters, even when everyone else is rolling on the floor laughing or trying to force down the vomit.   

If I looked hard enough, I bet I could match up the THEY LIVE subliminal messages with actual Trump quotes.  In fact, it probably wouldn’t take that long.  It took me 0.5 seconds to find these on Google just now.

The greatest irony is that Trump convinced people that he was standing with common, blue collar Americans against the elite. Never mind the fact that Trump, living in a fucking golden tower, is the definition of elite.  Pack all of his unqualified billionaire Cabinet picks into a ball room and I imagine it would look exactly like when Nada and Frank stumble into a celebration for the aliens’ human conspirators, drinking Champagne and applauding the 39% gain to their portfolios.  

The only difference in that scenario is there is no way Trump would let a sellout bum like George “Buck” Flowers join the inner circle.  The most he would get for his collusion would be a hat.  Of course, given that Flowers just assumed Nada and Frank were fellow sellouts and gave them a full tour of the aliens’ secret command center, it might be the wiser policy.   

Luckily, there are a lot more people whose eyes are opened to Trump’s lies than there were to the THEY LIVE aliens (though not enough).  And the people who did vote for Trump aren’t stupid.  They were just looking for change and got caught up by a brash, unorthodox, and entirely unique campaign (although anyone who agrees with his racist, misogynist, bullying viewpoints can totally suck it).  Once Trump fails to magically bring back the obsolete manufacturing jobs he promised, or to be the most job producing president God has ever created, more eyes will open.  America will see him for what he is.  The realization will be gradual; we don’t have Nada to destroy the signal that clouds everyone’s perception.  It’s not going to be like the last scene where the woman suddenly sees that she is having sex with a decay-faced monster.  Unless her name is Melania.

C Chaka

Rising Up – EVERLY

Four years is a long time to be trapped with people who don't respect you.  People who want to silence your voice.  People who want to use you, and don’t care about your health and well-being.  People who endanger your family.  Salma Hayek’s titular character from 2014’s high action siege movie EVERLY knows about these people, and she’s determined that four years are all they are going to get from her.

The Capsule:

We come into the worst day of Everly’s (Salma Hayek) thoroughly fucked up life, already in progress.  Her only shot of escaping four years of slavery under the Yakuza boss Taiko (Hiroyuki Watanabe)  has gone tits up in spectacular fashion.  Her only option seems to be to lay down and die.  Instead, she blows away a whole room full of gangster scumbags and plunges headlong into a new plan: kill everyone who stands between her and the door.  More important than her own freedom, she must make sure her mother (Laura Cepeda) and daughter Maisey (Aisha Ayamah) get the money she has squirreled away in order to buy them another life.  Blocked at every turn, Everly must deal with wave after wave of killer prostitutes, corrupt cops, guard dogs, and vicious torturers who are all determined to keep the boss’ plaything in her place.  Everly has had enough and she is willing to bring the entire building down if it means saving her daughter from the hell she has endured.

Selma Hayek is phenomenal as Everly.  She's a badass, but in the same way John McClane was in DIE HARD.  She doesn’t want to be in that situation, she just doesn’t have a choice.  She is terrified in the beginning, stumbling and not knowing exactly what to do.  The first time she picks up a submachine gun, she empties the clip into the ceiling without hitting anything.  The only think keeping her going is her unwavering determination.  

Like John McClane, she takes an ever increasing amount of punishment throughout the movie.  A bullet wound through the side (and later the shoulder), cuts, gashes, contusions, acid burns, she has to push through it all.  Luckily for her, she also follows McClane’s rule that gunshots only hurt when you can see them bleeding.   Slap some duct tape on and she’s doing fine.

Everly may start out shaky, but once she gets her confidence back, she is a serious piece of work.  Nothing is revealed about what Everly was like before the abduction.  There is no indication she had any special training, but she's good with a gun and not squeamish about having to kill a guy (or twenty), so she wasn’t an average soccer mom.  She knows how to leverage her advantages.  She takes out a squad of goons in full tactical gear by being faster, smarter, and even more ruthless.

It should be noted that Selma Hayek was 48 years old when she made this movie.  Time has been very, very good to her.  She is amazingly fit, able to roll with some grueling fight sequences and lug around a huge machine gun believably.  She had a stunt double for the extreme stuff like diving over counters and getting blown through doorways, but Hayek herself is slogging her way through the majority of the punishment.  And even under all the bruises and blood, she is still fiercely beautiful.  

Incidentally, the role of Everly was originally slated for Kate Hudson.  I cannot even imagine what the hell that movie would look like.  There aren’t that many Yakuza rom-coms out there.

Structurally, EVERLY is a very odd movie.  The bulk of its running time is spent in only one location, the (initially) luxurious apartment that has been Everly’s cell for the last four years.  There are eventually quick trips to the hall way and to an adjacent apartment, and we get to see other parts of the building through security footage, but otherwise this could be an extremely violent and explosive stage play.  

The subject matter is incredibly dark, and it does not shy away from indicating exactly what these Yakuza bastards think of women.   When Taiko threatens to bring in Everly’s little girl to fill her vacancy at the hotel, we know the sick son of a bitch isn’t bluffing. 

For as grim and gritty as the tone can be, the movie veers into some very crazy territory.  Everly’s first trial after defying Taiko is to fend off a group of bombastic Yakuza prostitutes all fighting for the brand new bounty placed on her head.  They all live and work together on the same level of the apartment building, so it has an additional awkward quality, like being attacked by the people in your office.  They seem to have more freedom (and a lot more weapons) than Everly, though.  A couple of them are straight up murderous, but several are sympathetic to her plight.  The money is just too good to pass up.  Except that they really should have.

Director Joe Lynch has his own style, but he owes a lot to Tarantino, especially with the injection of morbid humor into a tense situation.  One example is when Everly realizes Maisey is face to face with Bonsai, a vicious and much disliked guard dog.  Bonsai’s smirking handler keeps his hand on the dog’s collar as Everly slowly reaches down to pick up her child, letting him loose just as she grabs her.  Everly races back into the apartment and is a second away from being torn apart when she tosses a grenade into the hall.  The dog bolts out to fetch it, with the handler running after yelling, “Bonsai, that’s not a ball!”  Boom.

The action is quick, frantic, but well shot and easy to track.  It can also be satisfyingly over the top.  One scene has Everly tossing a grenade into an elevator full of gangsters just as the doors close.  There is the sound of an explosion and a huge jet of blood shoots from between the seam of the doors.  It’s like a miniature version of the blood elevator from THE SHINNING.  

There are long pauses in between the action sequences when Everly gets to catch her breath.  She even has the chance to clean up the apartment and take a shower before her mom and Maisey show up.  I found this initially unnatural and distracting, but there is an explanation near the end that makes sense.  More importantly, it gives the movie time to develop some true pathos between characters (the ones that last more than 30 seconds, at least).  

One of them is a victim of Everly’s first shooting spree.  Referred to callously as Dead Man by Everly, Akie Kotabe spends all of his screen time slowly bleeding to death on a couch.  Everly eases his suffering out of basic human compassion, but she doesn’t let him off the hook just because he is a soft spoken, gentle nerd in a suit.  Even though he didn’t participate in the abuse the other Yakuza inflicted on her (thankfully off screen), he did not stop them either.  In time though, she realizes he was in the same boat as her, forced by the Yakuza do to things that revolted him.  He is just another sad, isolated victim, though more by choice than Everly.  In the last moments of his life, he has finally made a real connection with a person, the woman who shot him.  His best moment is when he distracts Everly’s daughter from finding a stack of bodies by singing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” with her.  It isn’t enough to wipe the slate of his life clean, but it is the best he can do.

Everly has some very touching moments with her daughter, who was one year old the last time she saw her.  They are both awkward and unsure of each other.  Aisha Ayamah is a real cutie and plays Maisey with such shy innocence, it’s almost an emotional cheat.  Those scenes would be touching to anyone with an empathic bone in their body.  The real gut wrenching scenes come with Everly’s mother.  Not realizing what she has had to endure, her mom gives Everly hell for abandoning her daughter.  Everly has a more than valid excuse, but just sits there in the bathroom and lets her mother unload, overcome by four years of unreasonable but ever present guilt.  Once Everly explains what happened, corroborated by a bathtub full of dead gangsters, the two mothers finally have a true reconciliation.  It’s a beautiful and powerful moment.  

Good feelings only last a second, because then we come to the most batshit part of the movie, Togo Igawa as The Sadist.  He arrives wheeling in a half-naked man in a slender cage of hooked bars, accompanied by four freaks dressed as Kabuki demons.  Keep in mind, this is the guy the Yakuza call when they need things to get really hardcore, so we know he is bad news.  You never want to meet a cordial, well-dressed man carrying a medical bag filled with delicate bottles of various acids and poisons.  The entire sequence gets more and more surreal and frightening, especially once he gets Everly in the cage.  The power quickly shifts back and forth several times before the Sadist gets his fitting (and extremely messy) end.

The final showdown with Taiko is an all-out battle of wills; supreme arrogance and cruelty against unbreakable ferocity.   It doesn’t matter that Taiko has the upper hand.  As he slides his razor sharp sword across her skin, waxing on about the divine brutality of Yakuza love, she’s coming up with different ways to tell him to go fuck himself.  She will never again be his slave.  No matter what he does to her, she’s already beaten him.  And she still has a few more tricks up her sleeve.  

Metaphorically.  She’s wearing a tank top.

Everly’s situation is considerably more extreme than anything we are likely to face during our four year cohabitation with a cartoonish villain.  I also admit that some of us have had to deal with blatant disrespect and hostility for far more than four years (an entire lifetime, for instance, or many lifetimes).  But focusing on these upcoming four years in particular, there is a lot to take away from EVERLY.  We won’t (or shouldn’t) be fighting with bullets or grenades or swords, but we can fight with our words and actions and solidarity.  We can make it very clear right from the beginning that four years is all they are going to get from us.  Hopefully we don’t have to do it in ten inch high heels, though.  They look painful.

C Chaka

Always Coming Back - ZOMBIE

All movies are art.  Whether they are Rembrandt level masterpieces or pre-school macaroni pictures is up to the viewer.  Like all art, movies sometimes affect you in ways you cannot explain.  There may not be a rational reason why you are drawn to a particular movie.  It might not be a  genre you’re usually interested in, or it doesn’t have the most compelling story or performances.  Maybe it’s kind of dumb.  It doesn’t have to be your favorite, but you keep coming back to it year after year.  It’s your siren movie.  

It seems fitting to start the New Year with my number one siren movie, Bette Midler’s 1988 drama, BEACHES.  

Nah, I’m just fucking with you.  It’s Lucio Fulci’s 1979 gorefest, ZOMBIE.

The Capsule:

Investigative reporter Peter Wells (Ian McCulloch) and Anne Bowles (Tisa Farrow) head to the tiny Caribbean island of Matul in search of Anne’s father, whose boat drifted into New York harbor with only a very well fed zombie inside.  They charter a boat with Brian (Al Cliver) and Susan (Auretta Gay) a vacationing couple who enjoy fishing and topless scuba diving.  When they reach Matul, they find the island decimated by a mysterious disease that is killing the inhabitants and causing their corpses to rise and eat the flesh of the living.  Dr. Menard (Richard Johnson) is trying to hold things together, but he can’t even keep his wife safe from zombie related eye trauma.  What little stability is left quickly unravels and Peter & Company find themselves running from the extremely slow, extremely disgusting hoards of the dead.  They make a final stand at Menard’s hospital, which could become a fiery grave for them all.  

Alright, it's not such a stretch that my siren movie is ZOMBIE (aka ZOMBI 2, aka ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS).  Everything adds up.  I’m into Fulci, Italian zombie flicks, and gory movies.  The film is filled with incredible and well executed scenes, some decent performances, and is consistently fun.  There are just other zombie movies I love more.  I’m a bigger fan of the original DAWN OF THE DEAD (the king of all zombie movies, in my opinion).  I have more fun with the ridiculously schlocky ones like BURIAL GROUND or HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD.  I even think there are better Fulci films.  But I go back to ZOMBIE more than any of them.  I own a double DVD of ZOMBI 2, a Blu Ray of ZOMBIE, and a region B Blu of ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS.  They are all the same cut.  I can’t explain it.  I just re-watched it for this piece, and I kind of want to start it up again.  The heart wants what it wants.

Granted, there is A LOT to love about this movie.  The opening scene of the derelict sailboat is legitimately brilliant film making.  It harkens back to the classic passage about the ship carrying Dracula’s body floating unmanned into the port of London.  Fulci takes his time with it, slowly following the Harbor cops as they board the ghost ship.  The sense of dread builds as they wade through the debris and rotten food left behind in the cabin.  Just when the suspense becomes unbearable, the grotesque butterball zombie bursts through the door and takes a chunk out of the cop’s neck before he can even pull his gun.  It’s probably the most nightmarish sequence in the film because it nails that feeling of lingering in a place you know you shouldn’t be.  The rest of the movie can’t maintain the exquisite tension of that opening, though it often comes close.  

ZOMBIE is probably most famous for being the movie where a zombie fights a shark.  The fame is well deserved, as this is not a camera or editing trick, but a real live shark wrestling with a real live zombie.  Alright, he’s just a stuntman in zombie make up, but he is underwater with no breathing apparatus, and it is a real shark.  The best thing about the scene is that it is a full sequence.  Modern movies, like say, your SHARKNADOs, tend to just throw out batshit crazy ideas like this with no set up, focus on if for thirty seconds, and then move on.  It would only amount to one badly done computer effect, a virtual elbow in the ribs to tell the audience how wacky and irreverent the movie is.  Shark vs. Zombie, can you believe that shit?

Fulci plays the scene absolutely straight.  He also lets it build.  Exhibitionist diver Susan is first menaced by a tiger shark.  She eludes that danger, but then comes face to saggy face with a zombie.  It’s only after she fights her way out of the zombie’s grasp that the two hunters square off against each other.  The zombie draws first blood, tearing off a chunk of fin.  The shark bites off his arm and slowly swims away.  The zombie might claim that swimming away was a forfeit, but I would say the match clearly goes to the shark. 

I’ve seen some online criticism that the shark is toothless.  I definitely saw a few teeth in its mouth, though, and any amount of teeth in a shark is significant, in my opinion.  Regardless, a dude in zombie makeup wrestled a real, physical, very large shark.  It’s a cinematic accomplishment. 

This is not to say ZOMBIE is a perfect film.  The cast, for the most part is unexceptional.  Tisa Farrow, Mia’s less famous, less talented sister, has two expressions for the entire movie: frightened and idle.  Most of the time she looks like she is trying to remember her childhood phone number.  Al Cliver is little better.  He has the hunky action hero look down, but he is out acted by the zombies.  Ian McCulloch is one of the bright spots.  His quippy, self-deprecating Peter elevates the grim and serious tone in just the right moments. 

Richard Johnson also gives a nice performance as Dr. Menard.  Scruffy faced and perpetually dour (and drunk), he completely sells Menard as an exhausted scientist at the end of his rope.  He is set up early in the movie as having nefarious motives.  His ill-fated wife (Olga Karlatos) seems to think so, she threatens to tell everyone what he’s doing.  The thing is, he doesn’t seem to be actually doing anything.  There is no indication he is responsible for the outbreak, or that he is exploiting the victims, he is just treating them the best he can.  The fact that he can’t do anything to stop the disease or ease anyone’s suffering is why he is in this pitiful state.  

Much like Romero’s movies, the explanation of why the dead are returning is a mystery.  There is a lot of talk about voodoo rituals being the cause, but we never see any of them in practice.  Decades old corpses dig themselves out of their super shallow graves at one point, which seems to be supernatural, but the outbreak follows the pattern of a disease and zombies can be killed by destroying the brain (which the decades old corpses shouldn't have anymore, but do).  Menard doesn’t have conclusive evidence either way.  His superstitious lab assistant Lucas (Dakar, just Dakar) has the most plausible answer, “When the earth spits out the dead, they come back to suck the blood from the living.”  It’s a less elegant way of saying, “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth.”

This being a Fulci film, the gore is lovingly gratuitous.  It has a very well earned spot on the UK’s Video Nasty list.  Aside from the juicy headshots and jugular spray, there is one stand out bit when Menard’s wife gets her eye impaled on a shard of wood.  It’s not the penetration that is so disturbing, that bit is clearly fake (though effective).  The true horror comes from the extended tension as she is pulled towards her fate.  She sees exactly what is coming, but there is nothing she can do to stop it.  Except maybe turn her head.  She could have tried that.  In any event, this movie cemented Fulci’s title as “The Man Who Hates Eyeballs.”

My favorite thing about the movie, hands down, is the ending.  Peter and Anne have escaped the island on Brian’s boat, which could break down at any moment.  To cheer themselves up, they turn on the radio, only to hear an emergency report about New York City being overwhelmed by hoards of the undead.  Cut to a shot of dozens of zombies shuffling across the elevated walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge.  It’s a great shot for a few of reasons.  One, zombies matched against the old NYC skyline is eerily beautiful.  Two, it drives home that “oh shit” realization that the heroes haven’t really escaped anything.  Three, it proves that zombie outbreaks are actually very good for traffic, because on the roads beneath the walkway, cars are moving along at a very steady, even leisurely, pace. Keep that in mind when planning your next vacation.

As great as that shot is, my favorite thing about the ending is the realization that an entirely different story was going on the entire time Peter and Anne were on the island.  The zombie infection spread, either from the reanimated Harbor Patrol officer that we never saw rise, or the butterball zombie that fell off the boat but was not shot in the head, or both.  As good as ZOMBIE was, I can only dream how good the ZOMBIE side story would be.  This leads me to a theory.  

ZOMBIE was marketed in Italy as a sequel to DAWN OF THE DEAD, which was released there as ZOMBI.  Italy did this all the time, changing the title of a completely unrelated movie to cash in the success of a different movie.  But what if they weren’t as unrelated as everyone thinks?  What if the events leading to the beginning of DAWN OF THE DEAD (society crumbling under the weight of a growing zombie plague) were a result of what happened in New York during ZOMBIE?  So instead of DAWN being a sequel to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, it is actually the sequel to the unseen side story in ZOMBIE (aka ZOMBI 2).  How's that to twist your noodle?

ZOMBIE, I don't know how to quit you.

C Chaka