The Beast in All of Us

ALIEN will scare the pus out of you pinball machine. It artlessly fuses Jaws' jaws, Kubrick's 2001 portentousness, and-rather mystifyingly--a few feline hijinks from That Darn Cat. But why look for sources; the sources are every shitty horror flick ever made. The difference is that this is a vicious, cosmic, Dolby-ized shitty horror flick, with enough spattered innards to fill a Panavision popcorn popper.

Alien begins with a succession of long, slow pans through a spaceship, like 2001 without the Strauss. I was rocking in my seat with excitement: what movie would dare to have such a boring beginning if it weren't going to be scary as hell later? Unfortunately, those opening shots set the tempo for the whole film, with the alien's attacks serving as shrieking exclamation points.

The first murder is one of the most revolting yet put on film. It put me off my popcorn, and I'm not easily nauseated. Alien operates thereafter on our anticipation of similar blood and guts; the tension is totally mechanical and rather unfair. The movie proves witless, plotless, pointless, spectacularly unoriginal, and surprisingly cruel.

The cast is full of interesting character actors who have no chance to do their thing. Those who applaud Alien for featuring a "liberated, non-sexist" heroine-Signourney Weaver, who proves to be the strongest and most resourceful crew member--should take another look at her brawl with Ian Holm; at last we have a heroine sturdy enough to be elaborately bashed and pummelled, slammed and kicked with enough intensity to give sado-masochists wet dreams for millenia to come.

Director Ridley Scott stretches the movie out with assorted idiotic red herrings, the crew taking time out battling the monster to look for the ship's pet cat, Jonesy. As for the undulating ectoplasm known as the alien, you wonder why the crew isn't wearing lobster bibs. Somebody clearly had a good time putting it together--pouring on the blood, slime, and animal intestines--but the fun as all his. Actually, in its last scene the alien does exude a little personality, curled up in the corner of a space shuttle cleaning itself off, smacking its lips, coming to resemble a Hollywood producer, perhaps the producer of Alien, speculating on the grosses and gross-outs of his movie, and his new Beverly Hills mansion.

PROPHECY at least has a social conscience, pretending to explore the white man's physical and moral pollution of Indian lands in Maine. Methyl mercury, used to soak lumber, gets into the fish, which is later consumed by animals and humans. The poison primarily affects the fetus, causing nasty mutations, one of which--a huge, snorting, blood-soaked pig (or something)--menaces federal health investigator Robert Foxworth, his pregnant wife, Talia Shire, and assorted noble Indians and opportunistic lumber executives.

Unlike Alien, where the cast is confined to monosyllables, the characters in Prophecy talk. A lot. Long time. Enough exposition for five giant monster movies. Everybody has a point of view; so did I--I munched my popcorn and thought about the blonde three rows down. When it comes to mixing horror and blatant social criticism, I prefer Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster:

"Uh-oh, all that sewage pouring out of the Tokyo somestacks has created a giant monster."

"Well, we better send for Godzilla, hadn't we?"

"He'll protest us. Next time we'll know better than to pollute."

Alien is ugly in conception, but it achieves what it's after; Prophecy is an innocous shocker, dully made. Which is a surprise, because director John Frankheimer has made some wonderful thrillers; the least I expected was a little directorial style. Frankheimer keeps the killings relatively bloodless, but they're also flat and slightly rushed, lacking the witty camera set-ups or pungent, economical editing of a classic like Jaws. The baby mutants--popped little dragons--are rather cute, but they're straight out of Eraserhead. The big pig has no personality; at best, it suggests the nightmare of a Hasidic rabbi.

Alien and Prophecy have a common failing: they are scared stiff of stillness. There are no intentional laughs in either movie,and nobody smiles. The actors are too busy being realistic. And finally, the atmosphere of each becomes oppressive: the popcorn gets stuck in your throat. Existentially, Alien is more of a downer than Waiting for Godot. Beckett pins some hopes on the human spirit and personality; Alien presents people as walking red meat and pus for greedy lobsters.

PEAKING OF RED MEAT and pus, Dawn of the Dead, the nifty, entertaining sequel to Night of Living Dead (1969) is he work of George Romero, who may be a madman but is also an artist. Kooky scary, satirical, bloody as nell, Dawn has everything you could want from a summer horror movie and more. Romero has little criticisms of our society, but, unlike Prophecy, Dawn employs them as cunningly and efficiently as our body employs our vital organs, may of which are on display on the film.

The tone of Dawn is wildly different from Romero's earlier film, which was stark, claustrophobic, strewn with unintentional laughs, and genuinely funny. The gore and quick cutting help provide the scares, but the heavy use of shopping mall Muzak and color (the original was in black and white) buffer the horror and amplify the irony. It's also shockingly well-directed, blazingly edited (also by Romero), well-written (by Romero), and even well-acted (not by Romero)! The music editing, color, and jerky movements of the living dead combine to create a weird cinematic tour de force, and an all-too-colorful black comedy.

In the first film, you may remember, the newly dead began coming back to life and feeding on the living. (Nobody knows why, although one of Dawn's characters offers this explanation: "My grandfather used to tell us, 'When there's no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the earth'"). If a zombie doesn't completely consume someone, that person also comes back to life and eats flesh. You can permanently kill them by shooting them or bashing them in the head, but since they multiply rather fast, well--one way or another, they're gonna find you, they're gonna getcha getcha getcha getcha.

The film opens in a T.V. studio operated by the Emergency Broadcast System. (Yes, there's a reason for those shrill test frequencies that get you out of bed when you fall asleep the night before watching Kojak.) A moderator and a scientific expert are having a violent political disagreement about how to handle the zombies. In the pandemoniun, four people--a technician, his stage manager-girlfriend, and two armed guards--decide to take off (quite literally--they leave in a helicopter) and find a safer area. They eventually land in a large, abandoned shopping mall outside Pittsburgh and decide to stay there. Much of the film's remaining time is spent mowing down these jerky, green zombies, running them over, blasting their heads off, bashing them in, etc. It's fun. It's also gory enough to earn the film an X rating.

THE FILM has things to say about our consumer society. Although there are heavy-handed (though valid) references to the mall as a much-beloved place, which explains the zombies' attraction to it--flickers of pleasurable memories in otherwise dead brains--Romero's satirical jabs are more skillfully displayed by the four heroes' eventual life-style and by our acceptance and enjoyment of it. Once they flush out the zombies and barricade the entrances, they have all the stores to themselves--think of it! They set up house with the finest stereo equipment, unlimited gourmet foods and wine, chic, expensive clothing, sporting goods, etc. By surrounding themselves with material luxuries, they almost succeed in forgetting the hordes of zombies that surround the mall, clamoring at the entrances, waiting...waiting...It's an ingenious metaphor for our society's material-assisted repression of certain realities--poverty, social injustice, or more down to earth, our crippling over-dependence on oil, which we were made aware of in 1973 and managed to repress for six years.

The much criticized use of gore in Dawn of the Dead actually points up a primary virtue of horror films. Everytime somebody blasts off the side of a zombie's head, audiences cheer. Why shouldn't they? What else can you do to flesh-eating zombies? Monster movies reduce every conflict to black vs. white, good vs. evil--that's the point. But they're fantasies--they invoke the supernatural; they don't pretend that that's how it is in real life, the way John Wayne or Clint Eastwood movies do. You can't rehabilitate the alien or the zombies in Dawn-- you've got to blow them away. You don't have to blow away Vietnamese and have your audiences cheering it--unless, as in The Deer Hunter, you depict them as bloodthirsty aliens, which is a lie. (If anything, the Americans should have been depicted as aliens.) Nor do you have to blow away "social deviants" whose problems are considerably more complex than mere "badness". Horror movies are genuinely cathartic--they are not meant to be taken with you when you leave the theater; they don't explicitly or implicitly express right-wing political sympathizers.

KILLING THE MONSTER is also sanctioned by the Church. The triumph of Britain's Hammar horror films is that thay exploit the connection between aggression, sex, and religion. Each blow of that long, hard stake into the writhing female vampire's bosom practically reverberates with church bells. Perhaps unintentionally, these movies make it easy to see how poor, repressed Puritans could have burned men and women at the stake for witchcraft. Chances are, we would have done the same.

Romero's artistic glory is his ability to add a further dimension. He gives us our fun and then holds up the mirror so that we can see the blood dripping from our lips. Towards the end of the film, when a militant hippie motorcycle gang invades the shopping mall disrupting our heroes' idyllic existence and attempting to steal merchandise, we root for the zombies to eat them. When this low-life scum begins to dispatch zombies with startling efficiency and even more startling relish, we think "God damn sadists," and then: "Wait a minute--weren't we cheering this before? Weren't we getting the same kick out of vicariously mauling zombies? Are we any better than this low-life scum? Hmmm..." That's called, "the shock of recognition" and I'm amazed to be writing about it in connection with a film called Dawn of the Dead. It's easily one of the year's best movies horror or otherwise.

THE BIG BUDGET summer shockers--Prophecy, alien, The Omen in its time--are all wrong: humorless, literal-minded disasters. Horror movies thrive on satire, wit, ghoulish irreverence (or else elaborately-stylized reverence, as in the Hammar films, to the point where it's funny). Or else lots of erotic overtones. (Alien had some, but they're mitigated by the film's frigidity. Prophecy is sexless.) The British can usually make funnier and more stylish horror films, because they're so good about being shocked: "A vampire you say? My word..." Here are a few of the most precious moments in horror history: Ernest Thesiger plying Boris Karloff's Frankenstein monster with brandy and cigars; Carrie telekinetically crucifying her Jesus freak mother; Roy Scheider spooning fish entrails into the sea, prissily calling out to Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss "Why don't you guys shovel some of this shit?" and as he hits the last word, noticing this big shark a few feet from his face; Vincent Price, dressed as Richard III, leaning over a butt of marmsy wine in which he has just drowned a lush theater critic, sighing, "I hope he travels well"; Peter Cushing prattling pleasantly about stakes through the heart over snifters of brandy, while upstairs the heroine, her bosom heaving out of her nightgown, opens her window for Christopher Lee, his eyes blazing red, grinning through his fangs as he nuzzles her neck.

Campy, but so classy. Alien and Prophecy have no class. They are aimed at the huge, snorting, blood-soaked pigs we are, and not at the devilishly perverted highbrows we strive to be.