Conan the Barbarian: bludgeoning the classics

Steel versus sorcery, self-reliance versus hegemony, cold brutality versus hot sadism: there’s plenty of dramatic conflict inherent in Robert E. Howard’s oft-revived and re-tooled Conan tales, yet the only discernible conflict in director Marcus Nispel’s new Conan the Barbarian concerns the battle between the forces of inspiration and those of crass cynicism. The latter triumphs utterly.


Neither spectacularly awful not awfully spectacular, this new Conan makes good on none of its promises nor builds any momentum. A protracted prologue (with narration from Morgan Freeman!), which follows our titular barbarian from the womb (I mean this literally) through to childhood trauma, attempts to infuse the story with some psychology yet fails to produce a Conan half as compelling as Schwarzenegger’s far more single-minded embodiment. Once adult Conan (Jason Momoa, sneering with conviction and plenty buff, though he’d surely look more at home jumping off the top rope than fencing with sand demons) sets upon on his quest to avenge his father’s gruesome death, the film shifts into a steady and mind-numbing series of fight sequences, none of which are very imaginative nor support a coherent set of rules regarding the magical powers of its baddies.


John Milius’ 1982 Conan the Barbarian was an economical fantasy that thoughtfully embraced the savagery of its milieu and made its hero an emblem for its director’s anti-authoritarian, neo-anarchist beliefs and its singularly self-adoring star’s superman self-image. It also featured a wonderfully seductive villain in wigged James Earl Jones, was extremely entertaining and well-structured (the script came from Milius and Oliver Stone), and functioned as an interesting foil to Apocalypse Now (which was scripted by Milius and features a similar trajectory and virtually identical climax).


With its somewhat different narrative thrust (“arc” is too dynamic a term... come to think of it so is “thrust”), the new Conan can’t exactly be called a remake (despite echoes of the earlier film in the score and some of the choreography), but neither can anyone familiar with Milius’ film help but compare the two. The only things to recommend it are supporting performances from Ron Perlman and Conan’s martyred dad and Rose McGowan as the goth sorceress daughter of Conan’s adversary. Her inevitable demise during one of the film’s umpteen endings is almost a disappointment, but hardly enough to invoke “the lamentations of the women.”

The unforgettable Fire

For some reason Quest For Fire (1981) was one of the first movies I bought on DVD, and ever since I’ve had a hard time convincing people to watch it with me and I don’t understand why. It’s set 80,000 years ago. It was directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and adapted from J.H. Rosny aîné’s novel by frequent Polanski collaborator Gérard Brach, with everybody speaking pre-historical lingo created by Anthony Burgess. It inspired a song by Iron Maiden and a band from Toronto. It was filmed in Iceland, Scotland, Kenya, and in the badlands of Alberta where I once roamed as a boy, and its landscapes are beautiful and vast.

There are various tribes in Quest For Fire, representing various stages of man’s evolution. The story follows a trio of Neanderthals who, not knowing how to build a fire, go out in search of one they can steal and bring back to their friends. The Neanderthals resemble an especially hirsute hippie desert death cult whose members drank the Kool-Aid and lived, except that in doing so they lost the capacity to form sentences, seem permanently stoned, and are now forced to constantly breathe through their mouths. Violence is everywhere, and women have it especially tough: rape is a casual occurrence. But we see our heroes improvise peace summits with wooly mammoths and fend off a bear. Ron Perlman (in a role that would threaten him with a strange sort of typecasting) discovers the humour in head injuries. Edmontonian Rae Dawn Chong invents the missionary position. One guy attempts to castrate another with his teeth. Everyone’s always panting, crying, salivating, jabbing, screaming, pointing, humping, waddling, running, grunting: being an actor in this movie would have been awesome. In fact several sequences are very much like some acting workshops I’ve attended.

My special fondness for Quest For Fire probably can’t be entirely explained, but I always visit museums of natural history in every city I pass through (I love the dioramas), and my favourite part of 2001 (1968) by far was always the ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence, so perhaps some part of me just instinctively responds to tribal frenzy, inarticulate yearning, and unkempt hair. Edmonton's Metro Cinema is showing Quest For Fire as part of their ‘Turkey Shoot’ series, but this is no turkey. It’s rich and fascinating, and, for obvious reasons, really, really funny.

Season of the Witch: some had it coming

After experiencing an unexpected moment of moral clarity while thrusting his blade through the belly of some helpless woman during the smoky Battle of Smyrna, Behmen (Nicolas Cage) and his grizzled old infidel-slaying buddy Felson (Ron Perlman) resolve to quit the Crusades and return to a plague-ridden Europe where everybody everywhere speaks English and have gone without shampoo for longer than anyone can remember. Picked up by some eagle-eyed church cops for desertion, Behmen and Felson decide to take an escort gig rather than face execution. Their destination is some remote mountain-top monastery, their cargo a wily teenager (Claire Foy) charged single-handedly causing the Black Death via witchcraft. Thing is, that accusation might just turn out to be entirely accurate, so you could say Season of the Witch starts out as a remake of The Seventh Seal, with Cage modelled after Von Sydow and Perlman after Björnstrand, turns into a Dungeons & Dragons module, pays homage to The Exorcist during its climactic supernatural showdown, while the whole thing could be interpreted as an apologia for the Inquisition, an implication exacerbated by the film’s entirely superfluous, essentially unrelated prelude concerning a conscientious priest who gets iced by an accused witch whose death by hanging he oversaw earlier that same day. But it might be grossly overestimating the ambitions of this project to presume any sort of polemic, even such an inanely misogynist one.

The reunion of Cage and Dominic Sena, who directed the actor in his remake of Gone in 60 Seconds, should have at least offered some super-stupid fun, but there’s an almost puzzling stiltedness to Season of the Witch. Cage seems largely disinterested, even in the bits where he gets to bark or convey spells of post-traumatic stress disorder. Sena meanwhile seems to be lacking decent coverage for virtually every scene, so many of which end with lingering close-ups of hammy reaction shots, that enduring convention of daytime soaps. Scripter Bragi F. Schut—not, from what I can tell, a pseudonym—resorts to medieval melodrama clichés and dialogue so comically leaden as to invoke Monty Python: “Damned fog. Like a veil before my eyes!”

But producers Alex Garter and Charles Roven should share some blame too, given that it looks like far too much of the film’s relatively limited budget was spent on umpteen needless crane shots and abysmally poor CGI, which winds up gauzed over everything from splintering bridges to apparently supernatural wolves to vast History Channel battle scenes. The zombie monks shamble about like puppets—could they not have just used puppets?

Cronos: moving parts

An aging seller of antiques is bitten by a strange device, begins to thirst for blood, and is rendered immortal, yet the word “vampiro” is never uttered in Cronos (1993), allowing our experience of the film to expand far beyond the limits of genre or myth. This is a film where the balance of explicit and occult knowledge is kept carefully calibrated at all times. We know only what’s essential, even if what’s essential sometimes includes the seemingly trivial. Every character, even the most minor, is endowed with distinct attributes, eccentricities and preoccupations, most all of them concerning the imperfections of the flesh, while at the film’s centre lies an insectile machine inexplicably compelled to merge with flesh, blood and bone, luring all those who make contact with it into fathomless addiction.

When I first saw Cronos I was delighted to discover a horror film that seemed to share the labyrinthine thematic network of David Cronenberg’s corporeal cinema, so rich as it is in cerebral metaphor and arresting, guttural imagery. Yet Guillermo Del Toro, Cronos’ writer and director, would prove to possesses his own unique imaginative universe, one which embraces the fabulous and the supernatural in ways antithetical to Cronenberg’s materialist sensibility. Cronos was but the first giant step in a prolific career that would quickly, and rather deftly shift between the commercial and the personal. Nevertheless, even after The Devil’s Backbone (01) and Pan’s Labyrinth (06), Cronos remains my favourite Del Toro film. It’s not as lush nor as honed as the later work, but it has a shaggy perfection all its own, and that special air of an exuberant, exacting young artist trying everything for the first time. Del Toro has said that the worst thing a filmmaker can have is everything he or she needs, and maybe there’s something about Cronos that generates some extra electricity out of sheer hunger and determination. The film is now available on DVD and Blu-ray from Criterion.

So Jesús Gris (the great Federico Luppi, giving a marathon performance) unknowingly falls victim to the 400 year-old device. It comes to him by accident, latching onto first his hand and then his heart, its golden claws inserting themselves into his skin. Thenceforth desirous of human blood, Gris is haunted by need, and like any junky he endures humiliating scenes to fulfill this need, such as licking some stranger’s nosebleed off the marble floor of a public washroom. Gris is hunted by one Ángel de la Guardia (Ron Perlman, so funny and precise in his bits of behaviour), the nephew of a dying industrialist (Buñuel regular Claudio Brook) who knows of the device’s powers and wants it for himself. But Ángel would just as soon never find the device; he’s waited too long already for his uncle to die and leave him the generous inheritance which will finally allow him to get that nose job he’s dreamt of for so long.

Death and vanity loom over everything in Cronos, and the film brims with ghoulish humour. It also features moments of touching connection between Gris and his eight year-old granddaughter Aurora (Tamara Shanath). Aurora speaks little and rarely drives the action, yet she might be the film’s real heroine, hiding the device in her teddy bear—just like little Pearl hides the money in The Night of the Hunter (55)—and gradually learning to let go of her grandparent as a child’s first brush with death. That sense of loss and wonder is what lingers in the film’s final moments, and most especially its closing dedication to Del Toro’s grandmother, their relationship having inspired the one shared by Gris and Aurora. It’s a satisfying, somber resolution to a captivating journey through morbid pursuits, one that in all its errant Catholicism, its peculiar relationship to the United States, its wily suspicions about its colonialist past, and its inventive violence, could perhaps have only come from Mexico.

North to Alaska, where CGI elk freak the shit out of oilmen, who in turn freak the shit out of us, in Larry Fessenden's The Last Winter

The Wendigo is a wintry, ashen, emaciated, blood thirsty and all-around nasty creature of Algonquin origin, a malevolent spirit said to possess human beings, especially those who practice cannibalism. Like so many mythical beasts derived from oral traditions, it cuts a figure that can be deeply terrifying when left to the imagination, and is especially potent when applied figuratively to dark stories about individuals who dare to step over the frontiers of taboo. It’s kind of a shame then that Larry Fessenden, the American character actor who’s conjured Wendigo in his previous directorial efforts, ultimately gives in to actually showing us a pretty cheesy-looking Wendigo in the final moments of his latest, slickest movie The Last Winter (2006), because this otherwise creepy, resonant and smart—if very didactic—chamber horror yarn, set in a small oil drilling base in Alaska, deserves to fully capitalize on its subtlety. It also, in any event, deserves to be seen by a larger audience, which with any luck it might find now that it’s on DVD from IFC.

Following a congressional hearing that finally opens up Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration, a certain corporation called North smacks their lips and is ready to get drilling—if only they could get their equipment in. Sadly, Hoffman (the always terrific James LeGros), the “greenie” geologist hired by North to flesh out their PR campaign, has turned out to be a wicked messenger, the message being that this global warming stuff is really happening and the melting permafrost makes it basically impossible to traverse the tundra. Enter project manager Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman, that line-backer version of Tom Waits, here playing a highly enjoyable blowhard). An intimidating spokesman for the bottom line, Pollack arrives on the scene to ensure that North’s trucks make it through, even in the face of unnerving mishaps like employees going bonkers and a series of gruesome deaths.

Fessenden and his writing partner Robert Leaver had The Last Winter written back in 2001. As it generally goes with independent movies, the script took several years to be brought to life and by the time it saw the light of a movie theatre—it played briefly in New York last autumn—it’s political subtext had been beat to the punch by Al Gore and the little environmentalist documentary that could, An Inconvenient Truth (06). By the time most of us see it, its commentary on the sanguine undercurrent of oil drilling will have even been overshadowed by PT Anderson’s towering There Will Be Blood (07). But The Last Winter is here to—if you’ll excuse the paraphrasing—deliver the weather, not the news. Anyone who isn’t a total idiot doesn’t need a conceptual horror movie to know about global warming and the glossed-over evils of the oil industry, but The Last Winter channels these issues into a story that’s fundamentally designed to provide chills of a more primordial nature. As one character informs us, what is oil, after all, if not dead animals and dead plants? This perspective renders the cultivation of oil into a sort of ghoulish desecration, and helps make The Last Winter into a good old-fashioned tale of things that go bump in the night.

Speaking of bumping in the night, the film has some good subplots, such as the affair unfolding between Hoffman and Abby (played with just a hint of duplicity by the lovely Connie Britton), their noisy sexual activity keeping the emotionally bruised Pollack up in the wee hours, grinding the corporate axe with Hoffman’s name on it. I really liked that Fessenden and Leaver have Pollack engaging in territorial man-talk with Hoffman even when faced with the possibility of frozen death. It’s these very human details that keep The Last Winter buoyant, even when the bleakness of both big and little picture loom large over the proceedings.

IFC’s disc features a very worthwhile audio commentary from Fessenden, who’s informative, articulate and even quite funny in a rather dry sort of way. Of the film’s use of archival footage of oil drilling he explains, “It was very important to me to show oil drilling in a movie about oil drilling with no oil drilling.” It’s fun to hear him talk about his excitement over the benefits of working with a larger budget—the many helicopter shots, the dolly set-ups just for little stuff, the birds from Harry Potter, “the real stars of the movie,” Fessenden confesses— as well as with very good actors, and with Iceland, where he actually shot most of The Last Winter. (And it’s funnier still to learn that the groans of desire we hear from LeGros during his off-screen humpy-pumpy were actually taken from a scene in which he’s helping Perlman escape from drowning.) All in all, one can’t help but appreciate what Fessenden is trying to make: a thoughtful, medium-budget movie with indie credibility in a genre overrun with crappy excess. The Last Winter isn’t entirely a triumph in this regard, but it’s close enough to light the hope that Fessenden can keep going in this racket.