NYPD vs 666

The opening title card reads “Inspired by actual accounts,” which is distinct from “Based on a true story” in that it reads closer to “Somebody of indeterminate credibility claims something like this happened but mostly we made it up.” Which is understandable given that we’re watching a movie where a guy spontaneously bleeds from injuries inflicted by an invisible crown of thorns and features several incidents that could prove libellous for the NYPD. The filmmakers need to cover their collective ass. They also need to imply that what we’re seeing could’ve happened, Satan is real, and when the going gets tough you want to find yourself an hunky ex-junky Latino priest. Those guys are hard-core.  

Deliver Us From Evil takes place in 2013, a year in which New York apparently suffered constant brownouts and torrential downpours. Officer Ralph Sarchie (Eric Bana) gets a hunch one night—his partner calls this Sarchie’s “radar”—and accepts a call to investigate a domestic dispute involving a wife beater who acts like a rabid dog. The radar keeps going off over the ensuing nights and Sarchie winds up fending off large zoo animals, getting bitten by a lady who threw her kid in a ravine, witnessing an exploding corpse and befriending the aforementioned hunky ex-junky (Carlos star Édgar Ramírez), who gradually convinces Sarchie that his radar is really a God-given gift for sniffing evil and that he’ll need to confront his sinful past if he’s ever going to beat the Devil.

Sarchie is a real-life retired cop and demonologist. He co-founded the New York chapter of the New England Society of Psychic Research and has worked with the likes of Ed and Lorraine Warren, who were themselves the subject of a horror movie, last year’s The Conjuring. To Bana’s credit, movie-Sarchie’s eventual conversion to belief in demonic possession is barely foreshadowed. The arc of Deliver Us From Evil, its story an amalgamation of events chronicled in Sarchie’s memoir Beware the Night, is given shape by Sarchie’s reluctant acceptance of his calling.

Which brings us to our director and co-scenarist Scott Derrickson, who I confess to finding somewhat fascinating. Following a wildly unnecessary remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still and the haunted house movie Sinister, Deliver Us From Evil returns Derrickson, who was raised a Christian fundamentalist, to the thematic terrain of his feature debut The Exorcism of Emily Rose, a thriller-as-thesis statement exploring the mental illness versus demonic possession question and came out on the side of ambiguity and general tolerance of other people’s spiritual beliefs. That film, goofy as it was, works better than Deliver Us From Evil, which nosedives into overstatement and can’t resist a protracted operatic demon-outing climax that strains the “actual accounts” claim well past its breaking point.

Still, I feel friendly toward Evil. Derrickson’s a rare bird, both a true believer and a young director trying to navigate Hollywood—he’s said to be helming a Doctor Strange adaptation next. I think this film could have used more of the believer and less of the showman, but at least it keeps a sense of humour about itself, particularly with regards to its winking references to Poltergeist and Taxi Driver and a fun motif involving The Doors, whose music seems to follow Sarchie around. People are strange, just like the song says, so why can’t we have a morose Iraq vet-turned-house painter and lion whisperer who recites Latin and goes to work in the middle of the night made up like Alice Cooper?

             

The wrong side of the law

Set in Prohibition era rural Virginia, Lawless marks the fourth feature film collaboration between director John Hillcoat and musician, writer and occasional actor Nick Cave; it’s their second collaboration with Cave in the role of scenarist. Like Hillcoat’s The Proposition, which came from an original Cave script, Lawless, adapted from Matt Bondurant’s historical novel The Wettest County in the World—itself based on Bondurant’s own family history—follows the fates of three brutish brothers pitted against corrupt authorities. But The Proposition was a western set in Hillcoat and Cave’s native Australia, and was a far more distinctive and relevant piece of revisionist genre cinema. Much of what transpires in Lawless, by contrast, is as boilerplate as its title: the fraught fraternal hierarchy, the super-evil chief villain, the female characters neatly divided into Madonna and whore—even Cave’s score sounds kinda generic. The film is disappointing; whatever you thought of Hillcoat’s previous feature, The Road, which Cave scored, you couldn’t fault it for lack of ambition or aesthetic vision. Yet I can’t call Lawless a complete failure either.

The Bondurant brothers, Forrest (Tom Hardy), Howard (Jason Clarke) and Jack (Shia LeBeouf), are hillbilly bootleggers whose business is encroached upon by outsiders, led by Chicago-based special agent Charlie Rakes (Guy Pearce), looking to get in on the profits. The story is told from Jack’s point-of-view, which is unfortunate given LeBeouf’s overworked earnestness, but Jack is indeed the one undergoing the most radical shifts in character: we see the boys as kids in an overfamiliar prologue in which wimpy little Jack can’t work up the gumption to kill a hog, something his stoic elder brothers do without hesitation. Forrest is the most enigmatic character; at a young age he claimed he and his brothers were immortal, and Forrest Bondurant’s uncanny real-life biography, peppered with a series of injuries that most of us would never survive, feels like the best reason to tell this story in the first place. I wish it was more about Forrest and his strange life, and that Hardy was more central to the film since he also gives what is by far the most compelling performance.

Lawless’ most flamboyant performance however would easily be Pearce’s. His Rakes is an improbable dandy: eyebrows plucked, hair slicked and dyed to an ebony sheen, wearing delicate gloves and pearly waistcoats. He looks like Satan’s golf tee. Sneering and preening and gleefully sadistic, Pearce’s choice to hurl himself right over the top is a perfectly reasonable response to this character’s absurdly overstated villainy; the character also reads as a closeted homosexual monster, a fairly lazy, offensive, outdated paradigm.

While I’m a huge admirer of Cave’s work in most other circumstances, I recognize that the script for Lawless is the sum of Cave’s weakest tendencies. Nonetheless I could still imagine a more appealing realization of that script helmed by a director with more of humour, sense of place and affection for character, however archetypical, than Hillcoat displays here with his ceremoniousness, overstated brutality and overly cutty violence. It’s been nearly ten years since David Gordon Green made anything even close to worthy of the promise of his debut, George Washington; I wish someone like Green, the kind of filmmaker we used to label “regional,” could get this kind of a gig. Even with all its clichés, it would still have felt more shook alive and lived-in and curious about the world and the mysteries of the past. 

Pictures from a revolution/the sounds of Satan

By 1968 Jean-Luc Godard had abandoned the commercial film industry completely, despite international notoriety and success making films that already pushed fiercely against the boundaries of what a commercial film could be. His last such film was the magnificently apocalyptic Weekend (1967), which I wrote about last week. Sympathy for the Devil (1968), also known as One Plus One (Godard’s original and preferred title), is probably Godard’s most famous work from this radicalized, little-seen period, the reason being that the Rolling Stones appear in roughly half the film, though they are not there to provide excitement in any conventional sense.

Godard documented the Stones in the studio in long, uninterrupted, ominously slow tracking shots. They were working on an especially difficult to apprehend new song. Godard isn't dismayed by the ordinary tedium of studio labour; he lets it all play out. ‘Sympathy for the Devil,’ which would become one of the most distinctive, sinister, irresistible tunes in the Stones catalogue, chronicles the eponymous narrator’s diabolical accomplishments across two millennia, wearing many guises: “I stole many a man’s soul and face,” Mick Jagger sings. Jagger came in with lyrics and chords but the band had yet to summon the right groove. When they find it, turns out it’s samba, with Keith Richards on bass, Bill Wyman shaking maracas, and later, in the film’s best documentary moment, the whole band, sans Jagger, huddled around a microphone singing the woo woos, along with a thin woman in huge hat and huge pants who I presume to be Anita Pallenberg. Decades of domestication makes it easy to forget that there was a time when some really believed the Stones were in league with Mephistopheles. (For more on this moment in Stonesology see Zachary Lazar’s excellent 2008 novel Sway.) But the cultivation of rock mythology was very far from Godard’s agenda, as is evident in cutaways to people spray-painting slogans like SOVIETCONG and FREUDEMOCRACY on London’s walls, cars, sidewalks and bridges, and in the film’s many elaborate staged sequences.

In the first such sequence a black man reclines in a wheelbarrow, under a bridge, surrounded by piles of wrecked cars—just one year after Weekend and it’s the end of civilization all over!—reading aloud from a book about musical appropriation and the roots of blues. Another man enters the frame to hand the reader a rifle; the camera then follows him back into the labyrinth of this Battersea scrapyard, where still more men, all of them pretend Black Panthers, read from other texts into recording devices, texts about race war and black unity. Soon a red Mini arrives with captive white girls wearing white shifts. One of their captors reads from an ode to white women, how he loves to smell their drawers, and so on. Later a camera crew follows a pretty young woman through a wood, posing questions about drugs, culture, politics, Vietnam, to which she answers only “yes” or “no.” Later still there’s a bookstore crammed with pulp and girly mags, where another man reads aloud and captive Maoists sits miserably in one corner.

So what’s it all about? The film’s too cryptic to be didactic, too detached and adrift to be agitprop. Something forming in the studio, something forming in the streets. Something about rising up, violence, overturning order, but always with posterity in mind. In every scene something’s being enacted, recited, and, above all, recorded. The revolution will not be televised but it will be spoken into machines for future reference. Somewhere in all this, between takes, Jagger sings the title verse of ‘No Expectations.’ Sound advice for prospective viewers of this film. 

The Rite: Study hard, eat well, exorcize regularly

Diagnosed with a dearth of faith, aspiring priest Michael Kovak (Colin O’Donoghue), who only joined the seminary to wriggle out of working at his old man’s funeral home anyway, gets sent to exorcist school at the Vatican, where he meets a kooky old Welshman (Anthony Hopkins) who teaches him the ropes. Their first client’s a pregnant teen who becomes a contortionist and barfs up bloody spikes whenever the Devil’s steering the bus. But what really rattles Michael’s sturdy skepticism is the way Satan seems to know his secrets, and speaks them out loud through the mouths of the possessed, in front of everybody, and in English, no less. Because The Rite is fundamentally about the acquisition of faith, as a weapon against diabolical forces attempting to control the flesh, as a way of focusing your mind and settling on a career. This is the story of a young fellow finding his vocation, and thus doubles as a recruitment video for the Catholic Church. Come, we’re told, and fetching Italian journalists will dig you, even if you can’t make out with them. More importantly, you’ll get to put demons in the sleeper-hold on a regular basis.

I certainly appreciate how The Rite, helmed by 1408 director Mikael Håfström, “inspired by” true events and “suggested by” a book by Matt Braglio, honours its own convictions enough to hold off on dopey spectacle and manifest its evil in relatively subtler forms—if Satan made everybody levitate and do the head-spin there wouldn’t be any reason to doubt his existence. Perhaps the central problem with the film is that its conflicts are so abstract and internal that the final showdown feels artificially protracted and actually pretty dull, with not especially riveting newcomer O’Donoghue driving the devil out of Hopkins, who in going from mentor to victim gets to transition from affecting an amusingly businesslike air to supplying a torrent of Hannibal Lecter-like taunts. At least he’s having fun.

There’s also something about the way The Rite appeals to the ostensible latent Catholic in all of us that feels annoyingly simplistic, that feeds into a childish desire for sweeping solutions to life’s most complex problems and absolutions from responsibility for our inner demons. Michael does indeed initially question church dogma and defer to psychology in his attempts to explain away freaky phenomena, but once he rises to the occasion and casts Satan out of a poor soul the implication is that he’s learned a glorious truth, one tantamount to a free lunch: by simply speaking some magic words, The Rite assures us, and doing so like you really mean it, we can each of us be cured of what agonizes us.

If I were John Carpenter and you were a Satan: revisiting Prince of Darkness

In some dilapidated, out-of-use Los Angeles church sits the ultimate cocktail. It swirls in a cylinder, demon-green, smoky, and capable of inducing a hell of a mean drunk. Donald Pleasence is a priest who enlists Victor Wong’s cockeyed, waddling old professor and his finest PhD physics students to come and investigate the weirdness. According to the promptly decoded accompanying literature the cocktail is actually the Anti-Christ, waiting to materialize and enter the world all decked out in Nosferatu garb. The local homeless population, overdressed and uniformly grotesque, stand around like catatonics apparently waiting to do the evil one’s bidding, whereas the Anti-Christ has to hork loogies into the mouths of the smart middleclass academics to get them playing on his team. One of them turns into a pillar of bugs before collapsing in the parking lot. Another has her skin turned inside out and hangs before a mirror to take Satan by the hand and pull him out. Tachyon transmissions from the future override the dreams of all involved. “Our logic collapses on the subatomic level into ghosts and shadows,” says Wong. It also collapses at the movies, which can invade our subconscious even while our conscious mind knows perfectly well that what we’re watching is very, very silly.


Prince of Darkness screened last night at my neighbourhood second-run/rep cinema. I was eager to revisit the film after having last seen it at least a decade and a half ago—the length of my adult life, basically. I was prompted not only by a voracious appetite for horror, not only by a longing to remember what it was about the film that scared me so intensely as a kid. (For the record, it was the grainy television broadcast dreams from the future, as well as that startlingly despairing image of a woman suddenly finding herself trapped forever on the other side of a mirror with Satan. Plus, well, anything apocalyptic freaked me out as a kid.) What drew me to watch Prince of Darkness again was also my recent reading of Kent Jones’ eloquent 1998 essay on Carpenter, ‘American Movie Classic.’ Jones is one of the very few critics whose work has not only enlightened but actually moved me, and his heartfelt defense of Carpenter’s oeuvre struck a chord, especially since it reminded me of one of the most arrogant things I think I ever wrote in my shambling, accidental career as a critic. It was something to the effect of Carpenter seeming like “kind of a dumb guy.” I won’t try to justify this now rather embarrassing statement other than to say I was reviewing Ghosts of Mars—sorry, John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars—I was very young, and I was trying on what I thought might be the critic’s cloak. (Rest assured, a reader did write in to take me to task for this.) The one piece of advice that Paul Matwychuk, my first editor, always stressed when asked was that I should be more opinionated. He was absolutely right to do suggest this to me, but it’s an inherent risk of the trade that sometimes being opinionated winds up making you sound like a nincompoop.


“Carpenter stands completely and utterly alone as the last genre filmmaker in America,” writes Jones. My first response to reading this was, what about Carl Franklin? But my second was a sense of the genuine nobility of this role in the film industry, a role once filled with such dynamicism by the likes of, to use Jones’ examples, Edgar G. Ulmer or Robert Siodmack. Cinema history has taught us repeatedly that working—seemingly—within the dictates of the establishment, within the literal generic, offers filmmakers unique opportunities for subversion, subtlety, sophistication, and signature. But with the exception of Assault of Precinct 13, I confess that all my recent Carpenter viewings—which by means have been complete—have left me questioning again and again the distinction and richness of the filmmaker’s contributions to the various genres he’s dealt in.


Prince of Darkness is an interesting case study, written by Carpenter under a pseudonym, featuring no stars to overshadow the general buzz of collaboration under the guidance of a by then highly respected auteur—or to cloud the frequently awkward, faux-banal dialogue, hokey exposition, shrugged-off love story, or somewhat muddled treatise on the limits of science and religion and the ostensible urgency of their marriage. Of course, those TV news footage dreams and that through-the-looking-glass death shot endure, still freaking me out between my spells of hypnosis induced by yet another of Carpenter’s thin, monotonously portentous synth scores, and fits of spontaneous laughter, from myself and my fellow audience members, over Pleasence’s hammy monologues, Alice Cooper’s rather improbable impaling of a guy with a bicycle, Satan’s overwrought messages warning of his wrath, his acrobatic zombie minions, and that guy from Simon & Simon, who actually gives a fairly solid performance but whose moustache dances every time he smiles. (I should add however that Wong is terrific in the film, and the ending is quite nicely timed.) Jones champions Carpenter’s willingness to tell stories where protagonists are confronted with some pure, external evil, but I still question the depth of Carpenter’s investment in evil in Prince of Darkness as much as in Christine, where the car from hell is so inane it demands to take a backseat to the much more stimulating relationships, the nicely rendered air of teen alienation, and the filmmakers’ obsession with the vestiges of the 1950s. If only those elements, all of them worthwhile, could take control of the film rather than finally submit to the cornball, humdrum horror movie plot mechanics.


I’ll keep at this task of watching Carpenter’s films, probably every last one of them, partly out of my attempt to understand Jones’ fascination and respect, and partly because the truth is I have yet to see a single Carpenter film that’s all bad. Each seems to have its charms, the craftsmanship brought to the simplest details especially. The details are as consistently winning as the premises tend to feel negligible, leaving you wondering what does Carpenter really care about? What does he really want to share with us? What in these stories really speaks to him? I remember watching him interviewed on television and hearing him say that movies don’t scare him. So maybe that’s my fantasy John Carpenter movie, the one where we might actually get some glimpse at what really scares, beguiles, or moves John Carpenter.