For the week of June 23rd, Shout/Scream Factory is offering a new Blu-ray edition of the cult favorite Dog Soldiers. Nowadays, Marshall is probably best known for his work on HBO's Game of Thrones - showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff tend to bring in Marshall whenever they have an action-centric episode, like Season Two's "Blackwater" or Season Four's "The Watchers on the Wall" - but he made a name for himself with this scrappy action-horror story about a group of British Army soldiers (Kevin McKidd, Sean Pertwee, Darren Morfitt, Chris Robson, Leslie Simpson, and Thomas Lockyer) whose routine training exercise in the Scottish highlands turns into a battle against a pack of werewolves. Despite the picturesque settings, Marshall confines the bulk of the action to an abandoned farmhouse (all the better to keep the budget down, my dearies), and his werewolves, while strikingly designed (if more than a little reminiscent of Joe Dante's Howling beasties), don't have the mobility of, say, Rick Baker's Academy Award-winning werewolf effects for An American Werewolf in London. However, what helps the film rise above its limitations is Marshall's canny approach to familiar material. For one, he's always aware of his genre surroundings. Just as his 2005 chiller The Descent openly cribbed from The Thing, Deliverance, Apocalypse Now, and Brazil, so does Dog Soldiers pull from the aforementioned werewolf movies, From Dusk Till Dawn, Assault on Precinct 13 (the heroes trying to fight an enemy from without), Aliens (military vs. monsters), and even a little drawing-room mystery à la Agatha Christie as the main characters begin to suspect that one of their number is already a werewolf in disguise. Some might wonder if there's actually a movie under this mélange of winks, but Marshall's work is so fleet and knowing that we don't mind the references - we get a kick watching Marshall riff on familiar siege-movie dynamics or fashion Morfitt's Spoon as a 1:1 proxy for Bill Paxton's Hudson from Aliens. Furthermore, Marshall does yeoman's work as an action choreographer: he brings the same creative staging of his Game of Thrones episodes or his Roman warrior thriller Centurion to his man-on-wolf fights, and that's a good thing, since the high energy a) belies Dog Soldiers' modest budget and b) helps hide the fact that the practical werewolves can't really move their mouths. Marshall would go on to make bigger features (although the less said about Doomsday, the better), but in terms of raw energy and spunk, Dog Soldiers still holds an important spot in his CV.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that he was "not quite as enamored of the overall film as Mart[in Liebman] was in his review, but there's no denying Dog Soldiers' lo-fi 'charms' (I have to give props to the production team, many of whom hail from hardscrabble Newcastle, my father's birthplace). The fierce debate this release has engendered probably only goes to show how passionate some fans are about these cult titles. Is this release the latest harbinger of the apocalypse? Hardly. It's problematic, as both Marshall and Scream have discussed. If and when the negative is discovered, fans may have a bit more 'ammunition' in being able to ask for a more definitive release. For me personally, the care taken in the supplemental package helps to ameliorate any qualms about the video quality."
Next up is Criterion's new Blu-ray of The Fisher King, which would first seem to be as atypical for director Terry Gilliam as Dog Soldiers is familiar territory for Neil Marshall. Ever the fanciful, cynical absurdist (those Monty Python days die hard), Gilliam made a name for himself with a series of deliberately unreal and retro (perhaps unstuck in time is better) fables about the tortured interplay between humans, their imaginations, and their surrounding environments. That said, Gilliam blew his commercial cachet with the high-profile flop The Adventures of Baron Munchausen; the smaller-scaled Fisher King afforded him a chance to get out of director jail, but it also meant abandoning many of his auteurist impulses. This is his first contemporary picture (set in early 1990s New York City, no less) based off a screenplay he didn't write (the great Richard LaGravenese, who got an Academy Award nomination for his troubles here), and it even has an unironic, unequivocal happy ending far different than the downer conclusions of, oh, Brazil, Time Bandits, and Jabberwocky (where Michael Palin's unassuming hero gets a storybook ending, and it makes him miserable). Yet a funny thing happened during the filmmaking process. As much as TriStar Pictures might have wanted to use Gilliam as a hired gun (a feat the Weinstein brothers would accomplish, to dispiriting results, with 2005's The Brothers Grimm), the end result still feels like nothing less than an expression of Gilliam's febrile mind. In retrospect, of course he made a Terry Gilliam movie. The Fisher King is, after all, a fable about what happens when disgraced DJ Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges) ends up investing himself in the life of Parry (Robin Williams), a mentally unstable homeless man who believes he's destined to find the Holy Grail, and if that synopsis doesn't ring ever so slightly of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, then maybe Parry's obsession with his womanly ideal (Amanda Plummer) will remind you of the Jonathan Pryce-Kim Griest connection in Brazil, or you'll see some of Parry's mania as the progenitor for Brad Pitt's driven psychotic in 12 Monkeys.
The difference is, the constraints ultimately focus Gilliam's attentions. Anyone familiar with Gilliam's work knows his predilection to zip off on mad tangents (hell, he practically constructed The Adventures of Baron Munchausen out of nothing but mad tangents), but he can't do that here: LaGravenese provides him a rock-solid structure so that even though Gilliam is free to embellish the author's fantastical conceits (Parry imagining thousands of commuters in Grand Center Station suddenly breaking into a waltz; a demonic Red Knight that shoots fire from its head and rides a horse through Manhattan), he always has to return to that core relationship between Parry and Jack. Both men are profoundly damaged, albeit in different ways, and while we sense the clichés at work (these broken men will heal one another), Williams and Bridges burrow so deeply into their roles that their traditional three-act character arcs feel like the product of serious psychological excavating. It's the most moving human connection in all of Gilliam's films. A year ago, I might have singled out Bridges as the MVP - as is his wont (at least pre-TRON: Legacy), he is so subtle and precise that you never see him acting, especially in the interplay between him and Mercedes Ruehl, who's an Academy Award-winning standout as Bridges' earthy, no-B.S. girlfriend - but now Williams comes across as almost unbearably powerful. Part of that impact stems from Parry's fullness of spirit as a character - he allows Williams to unleash that life-force energy that few movies outside of Aladdin knew how to harness, so it's hard to even process that this dynamic performer at work could have shuffled off this mortal coil. But Parry also faces mental demons that mirror those that might have drove Williams to suicide, and you can't help but wonder how much Williams was drawing on his own inner pain to galvanize the character. As such, these men might earn their happy endings, but we never lose sight of the psychic torment that still lingers in the afterglow. The result is Gilliam's finest, most accessible film, a populist fable that's still wise to all the ways the world can hurt you.
In his Blu-ray review, Svet Atanasov wrote that "how much one enjoys The Fisher King will likely be determined by one's willingness to accept the fact that Gilliam does not favor one of the two identities. What this means is that the film is allowed to evolve without any fear how the silly and the serious or the sad and the funny would coexist. They just do and Gilliam does not attempt to logically explain why. In this borderline surreal environment, the actors do the best they can with the characters they are asked to play. In some sequences they delight, but elsewhere they struggle with lines and attitudes that clearly feel foreign to them (the late Roger Ebert described the double-date sequence as 'embarrassing,' and rightfully so). The visuals, however, are absolutely striking. Gilliam and cinematographer Roger Pratt repeatedly transform New York City from a modern metropolis into a Gothic kingdom in which knights and yellow cabs look perfectly normal. One could even be fooled to believe that there are a few castles hidden amongst the giant skyscrapers."
Finally, Kino Video is releasing a pair of interesting horror also-rans this week: Don Taylor's 1977 adaptation of H.G. Wells' classic The Island of Dr. Moreau and Fraser Heston's 1993 adaptation of Stephen King's Needful Things. Of the two, The Island of Dr. Moreau is best, but only because Wells' source material is superior to King's. His 1896 sci-fi chiller ranks with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as one of the most engaging nineteenth-century novels to deal with the rewards and ramification of technogenesis, in this case how the title character's advanced in genetics allow him to create a race of human-animal hybrids. Wells' work still retains its power to shock, and as such, filmmakers have always pursued it for dramatic inspiration in projects both sublime (Erle Kenton's brilliant Island of Lost Souls) and silly (John Frankenheimer's of the iconic 1996 fiasco, with its clinically insane Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer performances). Taylor's version falls somewhere in between. It's a reasonably faithful interpretation of the text marred by uninspired acting (as Moreau, Burt Lancaster picks up a check and little else) and flat, TV-esque direction that cheapens the otherwise fine makeup effects. You can watch this Moreau while checking your email and lose very little of the experience. Needful Things, however, is a more complicated case. Stephen King wrote a story about how the owner of a mystical antiques shop ends up wreaking havoc in a small Downeast Maine town (the fictional Castle Rock, which also pops up in The Dead Zone and Cujo), but its length (a bladder-busting 700 pages) diminishes the effectiveness of what could have been a mean, tight little shocker. King engineered his novel as a satirical take on post-1980s greed and excess, and you can see the remnants of the dark comedy buried under sub-Peyton Place dramatics. The film version, on the other hand, ups the pedigree of the source material (Ed Harris stars as heroic Sheriff Pangborn, Max von Sydow plays the devilish antiques owner, and the supporting cast is stuffed with character-actor ringers like Ray McKinnon, Amanda Plummer, Bonnie Bedelia, and the late, great J.T. Walsh) and gets the story done in two hours, yet ironically, it feels too rushed. We've barely had time to get the know the people of Castle Rock before the fit hits the shan, and although Heston orchestrates the various beatings, maimings, and killings with aplomb, a little breathing room wouldn't be a bad thing. Heston's preferred cut is around three hours long (you might have seen it in a severely compromised form - minus the graphic violence - on non-cable television) - maybe one day it'll get the full HD rollout.
Brian Orndorf noted that The Island of Dr. Moreau "los[es] much of Wells's savagery to keep a PG rating, [and] Taylor is left with an anti-climatic summation of power and the eventual disruption of Moreau's self-serving 'law,' finding the humanimal revolution lacking fervor that could inspire lasting reflection on the material's themes. Instead, the special effects go from meek to mad in a hurry, and the picture devolves from a study of ethical and moral corruption to a prison riot. The climax is loud and repetitive, but it's peppered with some rather frightening encounters between the stunt team and live animals, watching the humanimals wrestle with real creatures in a manner that suggests there was rarely a second take during this portion of filming. Lions are tossed out of windows, a puma freely roams the set, and a tiger works diligently to bite into one of his human co-stars. Big cats are batted around to provide spectacle, and it's effective, no doubt. However, this take on The Island of Dr. Moreau probably isn't a good gift idea for the animal lover in your life."
Of Needful Things, Michael Reuben noted that the film "explores a single idea, but it does so with such gleeful variety that the notion never grows dull. True temptation is an intimate affair. It occurs at the point where a person is most 'needful' and vulnerable. It may be something obvious like freedom from chronic pain or relief from desperate financial straits; or it may involve a subtler connection such as a link to a happier time in life when the world was full of hope and promise, or possibly some Holy Grail-like object that one never hoped to find (maybe even the Grail itself). Gaunt says that he offers his customers a 'choice,' but only in the sense that a heroin dealer offers choice to an addict. Once the customer is hooked on his or her 'needful thing' they will do anything to retain it. Despite the many suggestions that Gaunt is the devil - 'The young carpenter from Nazareth? I knew him well' - one need not take its religious references literally to accept the acuteness of the tale's psychological insight. Of course, the fact that a devil-like character is being played by the same actor who was Father Merrin in The Exorcist and Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told only adds layers of irony to Max von Sydow's portrayal of Gaunt, which the Swedish legend seems to have relished. According to the newly recorded commentary by director Heston, von Sydow was meticulous in working out even the smallest gesture of his performance. Perhaps that explains why he dominates every scene in which he appears, just as Gaunt overpowers everyone he encounters by the sheer force of his self-assurance. 'I don't work that way!' Gaunt responds to someone who tells him to do his own dirty work. Why should he, when there's always someone willing to do it for him, if they can just have the one thing they so dearly want?"