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?

             

When You're Strange: Waiting for the substance

Death was both the best and worst thing that Jim Morrison ever did to the Doors. His demise at 27 in a Parisian bathtub felt like some morbidly natural conclusion to a wildly dynamic narrative sparked on Venice beach only six years earlier, when Morrison first met and wooed keyboardist Ray Manzarek with the words to ‘Moonlight Drive.’ It also confined this band’s singular blend of baroque psychodrama and bluesy swagger to a time capsule and completed the total eclipse of the singer’s enigma over the richer, more intricate designs of the music to which he made such a vital, yet nonetheless only partial, contribution.

To ensure history that the Doors were so much more than just another ’60s psychedelic freak show, as well as more than just Jim Morrison, forms the ostensible raison d’être of Tom DiCillo’s When You’re Strange: A Film About the Doors. Yet this deeply orthodox rock-doc nearly sabotages itself with narration—voiced by Johnny Depp—riddled with token generalizations about youth culture ideology, and numerous montages that seemingly go out of their way to forever link the Doors’ music exclusively with the greatest hits of the period’s headlines, however incongruous, such the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Setting ‘Riders on the Storm’ to a series of clips of atrocities in Vietnam at once domesticates images that should never be treated lightly and severely limits the more mysterious and evocative qualities of that spectral late career hit.

I said the film nearly sabotages itself. What helps to rescue it from merely trading in tired clichés are the often mesmerizing performance clips, both on stage and in studio, that finds a quartet of musicians highly sensitizes to each other’s nuances, and, perhaps ironically, the leather-panted Lizard King himself. Archival footage, some never before seen, of Morrison as a teenager or some of the more off-the-cuff, backstage bits help to penetrate the Morrison mystique, which always threatened to drape the band in pretentiousness. Some of the more extensive clips allow us to glimpse a young, confused, awkwardly shy, gorgeous alcoholic, one given to faux inarticulateness and affected rowdiness, one always negotiating the conflicting impulses that prevented him from fully giving himself either to forging a larger, more demanding musical project or retreating into poetry and quietude. The Morrison we see, especially when still relatively untainted by celebrity, is at times genuinely spontaneous, deliciously mischievous, a man-child with an infectious grin and undiagnosed behavioral issues that when harnessed could yield some truly inspired performances, lyrics, and, yes, stunts.

A hard-working filmmaker who, having shot Jim Jarmusch’s early features, emerged from the 1980s independent scene to make cult films like Johnny Suede and Living in Oblivion, it’s not obvious what led to DiCillo’s helming of When You’re Strange, or to his pedestrian approach. The absence of talking head interviews with the surviving Doors or any other form of fresh commentary might seem like a virtue or some sort of rigour, an attempt to immerse us in the era. But I couldn’t help but gradually start to miss something else to balance this approach, something, again, to make the Doors about more than the 1960s, to offer something fresh about this band that for all its excesses deserves some serious reconsideration. Thankfully, the best documents of what the Doors were all about are still readily available—they’re called records.