Mighty Fish Brains - DEEP BLUE SEA

I tend to be biased about decades.  Not intentionally, it just happens.  I’ve come to regard the ‘70s as the greatest era in modern cinema, and I’ve always thought of the ‘80s as the most fun.  I even respect the strange dance between meticulously crafted blockbusters and tiny, heartfelt indies of today.  For some reason, I can’t even think of the 2000s as a decade, probably because it can’t be shortened into a cool sounding range (don’t even try to call it the Aughts, that’s just stupid).  Any scale has to have highs and lows, even arbitrary ones, and for me, the ‘90s gets the low.  Which is ridiculous, because an ocean of great movies came out in the ‘90s.  Tarantino came from the ‘90s, for god’s sake.  Objectively, I know this.  Some of our strongest held opinions come from the gut, though, and the gut is most often full of shit.

My unsubstantiated disdain likely comes from the changing theatrical landscape.  Local theaters and drive-ins were replaced by multiplexes.  Horror had withered and died on the big screen until Wes Craven reinvigorated the genre (again), but most of the glossy, over produced shockers than followed SCREAM felt toothless.  B-movies were squeezed out of the theaters and mutated into DTV (Direct to Video), which was harder to navigate because the Bland Photoshopped Floating Heads movie poster style made all DVD covers indistinguishable (you are not getting off the hook for that shit, The ‘90s).  The rise of the Indies might have brought loads of adorable quirk, but the decade felt devoid of the weird, cheap, inexplicable stuff that I love.

Again, I am totally wrong about that.  Weird stuff was still being made in the ‘90s.  I’ve covered a ton of it, (THE DARK BACKWARD, anyone?) in fact.   It mostly lived in the low budget, under the radar corners of the ´90s (as it did in every era), but the weird would occasionally crop up in a (modestly) big-time studio release.  For proof of this, look no further than the works of quintessential ‘90s director Renny Harlin.  Specifically, look at 1999’s smart shark adventure, DEEP BLUE SEA, because that shit is nuts.

The Capsule:

Billionaire adventurer Russell Franklin (Sam Jackson) gives chilly geneticist Dr. Susan McAlester (Saffron Burrows) 48 hours to convince him that her shark based Alzheimer’s treatment research is worth all the bad PR (over-privileged Spring Breakers almost getting eaten and the like).  She takes him to Aquatica, the fancy sea lab he paid for, to see the results in person.  He’s introduced to her mismatched team of oddballs, including equally serious scientist Jim Whitlock (Stellan Skarsgård), less serious facility engineer Tom Scoggins (Michael Rapaport), and utterly ridiculous chief Preacher (LL Cool J).  Franklin also meets the head shark whisperer, Carter Blake (Thomas Jane), right after he’s done showing off by wrestling a 12 foot tiger shark.  McAlester and Whitlock succeed in wowing Franklin, all thanks to the genetically enhanced brains of their three pet mako sharks.  Shockingly, it turns out that making massive, saw toothed killing machines really, really smart might not be the best idea after all when a disaster traps everyone in the rapidly flooding sea lab.  The crew desperately races to escape rising water and hungry jaws, while the brainy sharks might have more in mind than just snacking on scientists.

Renny Harlin was always a Hollywood outsider, even when directing big budget action blockbusters like DIE HARD 2 and CLIFFHANGER.  He walks the line between delivering on expectations and subverting them.  He'll deliver the goods, just not always by the obvious route.  It's what makes his movies stand out.  THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT was his masterwork (with generous help from Shane Black's whip smart script).  Not even the smartest shark in the ocean could compete with Charly Baltimore, but DEEP BLUE SEA is such an entertaining mix of clever and stupid that it works all on its own.

From the showy, bombastic double punch of disaster action that gets the ball rolling—the slow-mo fury of a hurricane directly transitioning into an orgy of explosions—it seems like we’re in for a pretty, yet predictable, Jerry Bruckheimer style outing.  Once inside the sinking lab, however, everything becomes claustrophobic and palpably tense.  The half-submerged environment highlights the disadvantages of being human: they move slowly through water, they can’t see what’s coming, they are soft and chewable.

The movie is filled with fun, left field moments, but the kicker is undoubtedly Sam Jackson’s Hero Speech.  Roughly halfway in, when the survivors are bickering and demoralized, Russel Franklin steps up and takes charge.  Every eye is on him as he reveals his tragic backstory and the hard lessons it taught him about survival.  If they want to get out of this alive, he explains, they must bury their fear and work together.  It’s all very inspirational, right up to the point where [Spoiler] a shark jumps out of the pool behind him and bites him in half.   It’s a hilariously shocking moment, and while it has lost some of its impact from the countless times it has been copied, I still get a giddy charge watching it.

Not everything works.  The CGI effects are laughably outdated (the storm waves are on par with a Playstation 2 cut scene).  The three sharks are indistinguishable, and their  proportions vary wildly depending on the scene.  Michael Rapaport, the official mascot of the ’90s, runs his bro-y New York pessimist routine into the ground within minutes and literally cannot get killed fast enough (sorry Michael, you were great in COPLAND and BEAUTIFUL GIRLS, playing basically the same character).  LL Cool J, on the other hand, unself-consciously owns his comic relief status and become one of the most entertaining parts of the film.  I love that Harlin was bold enough to give him a potty mouthed parrot sidekick and smart enough to get rid of it just before the gag gets tired.  

His character of Preacher fares much better, as well, continuing the maxim that the safest person to be in a ‘90s horror/monster movie is a rapper.  This was a direct reaction to the criticism that black guys always died first in horror movies (a huge exaggeration, the black guy always died first in action movies, not horror).  Like Ice Cube in ANACONDA and LL again in HALLOWEEN H20, DEEP BLUE SEA teases his death mercilessly.  In probably the best sequence in the movie, Preacher narrowly escapes a shark chasing him through his flooded kitchen by climbing into an industrial oven.  Obviously, this is not the best place to hide, but as long as—goddamn it, the shark turned on the oven (just the gas part, the movie isn’t completely sadistic).  The joke's on the shark, though, because not only does Preacher manage to escape the oven, he uses the gas to blow the brainy bastard up.  LL might be the comic relief, but he gets his share of badass moments.

The most dangerous thing about the sharks isn't their super intelligence or their toothy maws, but that all three, including the female, are total dicks.   You can tell right from the beginning because all the smart sharks eat are other, dumber sharks.  Once they start dining on the crew, it’s not enough to just kill them, the jerks turn each death into a big bloody display to rub it in the survivors’ faces.   “Ha ha, I’m eating your friend!”  

The worst indignities go to Skarsgård’s poor Dr. Whitlock.  First, he gets his arm bitten off while celebrating a successful demonstration.  Then the medevac helicopter accidentally drops his gurney into the shark tank.  Before they can reel him back up, the sharks zoom off with him, dragging down the helicopter in the process.  That crash results in a firestorm that kills a bunch more people and starts flooding the lab.  Wait, there’s more.  While everyone below deck tries to figure out what the hell just happened, a shark swims towards the window, Whitlock’s gurney its jaws—complete with a still conscious Whitlock in a breathing mask.  The shark sends the terrified scientist smashing head first into the window, right in front his girlfriend, no less.  What an asshole.  

Harlin wisely emphasizes the absurdity of the super intelligent sharks.  They are practically elevated to the level of a Bond movie mastermind.  They can work as a team, pick locks, and set traps.  They even sabotage the lab’s only sub, the nautical equivalent of the killer disabling the teens' car engine in a slasher.  The crowning moment is when Carter Blake realizes that the ENTIRE string of events was orchestrated by the sharks so they could escape into open waters.  I’ll bet even the hurricane was part of their plan.  My one regret is that the boss girl shark didn’t fashion some sort of telepathic Speak & Spell gizmo so she could deliver a villain monologue.  “What’s wrong, Mr. Blake?  You’re looking a little…green around the gills.”

At its heart, DEEP BLUE SEA is more Frankenstein fable than Sharksploitation.  While super entertaining, it has the same problem I have with in all Frankenstein fables, the Science Is Bad sermon.  When Dr. McAlester makes the effort to save her research, work that could bring about an end to mental degenerative diseases, one of her coworkers takes the moral highwater and asks if it was worth the lives of her whole team.  Not to sound insensitive, but yeah, in that case it actually is.   I’ve always been pro-mad science, but McAlester clearly had noble aspirations, if not the best execution (maybe you should have given the big brain to a nurse shark instead of a mako).  Save your shame for the guys who make dangerous creatures for the sake of amusement parks.  The movie definitely favors street smarts over book smarts, as far as survivors go.  On the other hand, McAlester gets to use her ivy league brain to safely electrocute a shark while in her underwear, so science has its advantages.

Clearly, I have no right to be down on the '90s.  That decade of filmmaking had a style just as distinct and authentic as any other.  Great works were made.  Next time I doubt it, I need look no farther than the DEEP BLUE SEA credits, where LL Cool J performs the movie's theme song, Deepest Bluest, from the shark's perspective.  Nothing sums up the '90s more than that.

C Chaka

Fever Fairy Tale – EATEN ALIVE

I did not want to do another post like this so soon.  I like to think I´ll never have to do them at all.  Some directors are so important to me that I disconnect them from the reality of the mortal coil.  They seem immortal. They are only as far away as my movie library.  I can connect with them at any time.  Then real life punches me in the gut.  It's always a shock to truly lose someone.  Romero’s passing hit me hard.  Tobe Hooper’s passing has devastated me.  

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE is the best horror movie ever made, hands down.  According to my hands, at least.  Nothing else matches the terror radiating from Marilyn Burns during that family dinner scene.  I have never seen anyone put fear on film like Tobe Hooper.  It's not the fear that I admire most about the directer, though.  It's the fearlessness.  Hooper was not afraid to mix things up, to discard tradition, and to follow his own path.  He pinballed from sideshow freaks to suburban ghosts to naked space vampires.  He never took the safe bet.  His own sequel to TCM was everything the original wasn't, goofy, surreal, gory, over the top, and extremely funny.  It wasn't what anyone was expecting, and it was beautiful.  Hooper helped me develop an appreciation for strange, off-kilter cinema.  His movies showed me that flawed and unexpected can be more entertaining than perfect and predictable.

Like my ode to Romero’s DAY OF THE DEAD, I prefer to celebrate Hooper's work rather than mourn his passing.  So I’m diving into one of his movies that brings me absolute joy.  Not TCM, because it’s a bit too heavy for me right now.  Not THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2, because this post would be 5,000 words long at least.  Instead, I present a less regarded but highly potent bit of madness about a man and his crocodile, 1976’s EATEN ALIVE.

The Capsule:

Judd (Nevil Brand) is an odd duck.  He mumbles incessantly to himself about his WWII trauma.  He's got issues with women, and terrible taste in music.  He does a lousy job of maintaining his dilapidated bayou hotel, The Starlight.  He also has the nasty habit of murdering the occasional guest with gardening tools and feeding the body to his massive pet crocodile he keeps in a pen beside the hotel.  Wide eyed Clara (Roberta Collins) finds this out the hard way when she takes refuge at the Starlight after fleeing the glamorous life of a swamp prostitute.  Judd barely has time to clean up before Clara’s father (Mel Ferrer) and sister (Crystin Sinclaire) come looking for her.  While trying to throw them off the trail, Judd must also make room for the mentally disturbed Roy (William Finley), his put-upon wife Faye (Marilyn Burns), and their adorable little moppet Angie (Kyle Richards), after the croc accidentally gobbles up the family pooch.  The strain on Judd to keep it together gets worse when local hellion Buck (Robert Englund) starts causing trouble.  There is only so much a poor hotel manager can take before people start becoming croc bait.

EATEN ALIVE (aka DEATHTRAP, STARLIGHT SLAUGHTER, HORROR HOTEL, and about a million other titles) was Hooper’s follow-up to TCM.  In many ways, it is the complete opposite of its predecessor.  Gone are the wide-open location shots and realism.  EATEN ALIVE is shot entirely on a sound stage, including the exteriors.  Hooper doesn’t bother trying to fool you.  Everything is artificial and confined, the lighting is unnatural, the color is otherworldly.  Not even time flows sensibly.  The color of the "sky" changes from an electric blue twilight to a nuclear blasted red dawn, but the night never ends. The term “fever dream” is inadequate to describe this nightmare, it’s a full-strength fever fairy tale.  Sort of like Hansel and Gretel re-imagined after a 12 hour mescaline trip. 

Part of the unreality is the idea thant anyone, no matter how desperate, would stay at the Starlight.  Never mind spooky, the ramshackle building itself looks dangerous.  There might as well be signs in the window advertising "In Room Silverfish" and “Free Tetanus with Every Stay!”  While it lacks the overtly insane set decor of TCM’s skeleton sofa and bone mobiles, it comes close.  Instead of a chicken in a birdcage, it has the saddest monkey in the world, languidly reaching for the sides of its wire cage.  Eventually, it dies of ennui.  I hope that it and the croc are the extent of the “Zoo” Judd advertises on the side of the building.  If there are any other attractions--a three-legged goat with syphilis, for instance--I’m glad we didn’t get to see them.

Although it was originally envisioned as a JAWS knock off, Hooper made the killer croc only a minor element to the story.  That was a smart move, because it is one of the shoddiest mechanical (?) monsters ever designed. Most of the time it looks like an immobile crocodile shaped canoe with a flip up jaw.  The shots of it chasing Angie around under the hotel are even worse.  Paper mache was likely involved.  For one shot of the croc racing at Angie, they attach the camera to the back of some sort of push toy gizmo with rapidly flailing legs.  It looks like she is being charged by Kermit the Frog.  In any other film, this would be a crippling drawback.  Here, it just adds to the lunatic tone.

It hardly matters, because the real beast in this movie is Nevil Brand.  Hooper has a special gift for directing the unhinged.  Nevil Brand’s performance as Judd might even surpass Edwin Neil’s Hitchhiker from TCM or Bill Moseley’s Chop Top from TCM 2.  The scariest part of Brand’s performance is not when he is chasing his victims with a bloody scythe, it’s his slowly percolating build up.  Judd is a man with no ability to relate to human beings, but has been forced to do so due to his occupation.  Disturbing quirks creep out even when he is on his best behavior, like the way he sucks on the sign-in pencil tip before handing it to Clara.  Similar to fellow hospitality manager Norman Bates, he doesn’t want to kill anyone.  It is a compulsion that horrifies him.  Judd lacks Bates’ carefully constructed defense mechanisms, though.  His madness simply explodes in a giggling frenzy that leaves him shocked and agitated at the results.  Hooper excruciatingly teases the wind up with long takes of Judd nervously puttering around, switching on and off lamps, and listening to grating country western music that would drive anyone to violence.  It is a relief when he finally snaps.

Any average director would have had his hands full with such an all-consuming nutcase like Judd, but Hooper was anything but average.  This movie is filled with batshit incidental characters, none more so than Roy.  In his scant screen time, Roy gives Judd a serious run for his money.  At first, he seems like an everyday henpecked dad resentfully following his critical wife’s orders.  Once behind closed doors, though, he quickly unravels into a complete psychotic breakdown.  He searches the rug for his phantom eyeball because he thinks Faye put her cigarette out in it (she didn't).  He barks while his daughter is crying about her lost dog.  In one outstandingly bizarre sequence, he makes high pitched squeals while trying to psychically crush his wife’s brain.  The best thing is, there is no explanation whatsoever given as to why he is behaving like this.  Faye acts like it is nothing unusual, just Roy being Roy.   In any other horror movie, this guy would be the killer (and a memorable one).  Here he’s just a guy biding his time before being eaten.  

Hooper doesn’t stop there, he sprinkles weirdos throughout the picture.  A fresh faced Robert Englund is instantly loathsome from his very first line, "Name's Buck and I'm raring to fuck" (seems awfully similar to a certain character from KILL BILL VOL. 1, actually).  Then there’s the heartless brothel madam, Miss Hattie, played by Morticia Addams herself, Carolyn Jones, inexplicably wearing what looks like burn makeup.  Even the nameless guys at the bar are freaks, jumping around like Maori warriors at any provocation.  Everything is so consistently bizarre that when the ineffectual Sheriff (Stuart Whitman) and Clara’s sister Libby have a normal conversation together, it stands out like a sore thumb.

While EATEN ALIVE has a radically different style than CHAINSAW, there is one thread that runs through both.  Fear.  Nothing reaches the lofty heights of that Texas treat, but there are some doozies here.  A lot of credit goes to CHAINSAW vet Marilyn Burns as the long-suffering Faye.  I have never seen any other actor whip themselves into such an authentically extreme level of terror.  Like her previous outing, her character doesn’t take much physical punishment, but is mentally tormented almost to the breaking point.  

As with the best of grungy ‘70s horror flicks, there are no safety nets here.  The story is so off the rails that anything could happen.  Normally when a kid is in danger, they are either taken out right away for shock value or they make it to the end.  Here, there is a very real chance cute little Angie could become a chew toy at any moment.  Why not? The violence Judd inflicts isn’t stylized, it’s just as clumsy and imprecise as you would expect from an old coot with a wooden leg.   The blood, although not excessive, looks disturbingly authentic as well.  It feels like the kind of movie where if someone had an accident on set, the footage would probably show up on the screen somewhere.  Not like a snuff film or anything.  Just a little, you know, snuffish.  

This film was honored with a spot on the notorious UK Video Nasty list, along with another one from Hooper, FUNHOUSE.  I’m sure their reasoning was that anything from the man that created THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE had to be harmful to young minds.  What I don’t understand is why THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE itself was never on the list.  Seems like an obvious oversight. I guess you can't accuse the censor board of being Britain's finest minds.

I never had the chance to meet Tobe Hooper, to shake his hand and tell him how much his movies meant to me.  He was a quiet, private man who rarely went to conventions or big events.  It's funny to think of how much beautiful madness came from such a soft spoken, mild mannered Texas gentleman.  It's a shame that we'll never get to see what he would have cooked up next, but I will treasure what he left us, flaws and all.  

Goodbye, Tobe.  You left the world a stranger place.

C Chaka