For the week of August 19th, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is bringing the superhero slasher Brightburn to Blu-ray. Brightburn has the most irresistible premise: what Superman was Damien from The Omen? Take all that power and put it in the hands of a psychotic kid with delusions of world domination. Comic books have been playing with this idea for decades, but a movie version carries such a singular charge. Studios all want to cultivate their own version of the MCU, and maybe the only way to stem the tide is to deconstruct the superhero narrative in the most subversive ways possible. And Brightburn has a bit of a head start given that producer James Gunn was into this whole deconstruction game before it was in vogue - his brilliant exploitationer Super moved like The Punisher starring Travis Bickle. Too bad, then, that Brightburn is such a joyless, violent slog. As a piece of filmmaking, Brightburn is dutiful, competent, and little else. Director David Yarovesky pulls off one good trick (Jackson Dunn's evil Clark Kent proxy will disappear and reappear in the frame through a series of unbroken camera pans) that he then repeats about one thousand times throughout the film's brief ninety-minute runtime. It's also aggressively unfunny, and here's where we really feel the lack of James Gunn as a significant creative collaborator (he just produced - his cousin Mark and his brother Brian wrote the script). Even when Gunn is working in a more adult vein (as with Super or his underrated monster-movie Slither), he's always devising interesting quirks and oddball dialogue. But other than the premise, Brightburn plays things pretty straight. Yarovesky gets a little mileage out of mimicking Zach Snyder's Man of Steel shooting style but just as Man of Steel felt burdened by its own self-serious pretensions, so does Brightburn struggle to satisfy any of its pulpier aims under all the heavy aesthetics. This tone might work if the film took Dunn's struggle seriously, if we felt him torn between his violent impulses and the loving care of his parents (David Denman and a very good Elizabeth Banks). But Dunn pretty much goes full psycho early on - spying on a cute girl, torturing a diner waitress (Becky Wahlstrom), exploding the lower jaw of his dad's best friend (Matt Jones) - so all the portent just drags. We can't really enjoy his reign of chaos because Yarovesky shoots the violence in such a graphic, upsetting fashion: people tend to beg and groan and bleed as Dunn kills them. In fact, the one moment the film nails its tone is during the end credits, when we get a montage of news footage detailing Dunn's destructive exploits. It's all so cartoony, and blessedly so: finally, we get a taste of what it might feel like were Superman to blaze a trail of pain and murder across the pages of a DC splash page. That's the sort of movie I could get behind.
Martin Liebman wrote that "there's little feel for any internal wrestling between good and evil, no rationalization or really even a hint of using his powers for anything other than violent mischief. For Brandon [Dunn] the satanic voice telling him to 'take the world' (which comes complete with a selection of blood-red hellish lights) is never just a temptation: it's a calling. And the boy quickly comes to realize that there's no room for love and normalcy in his life, taking up the mantle of a violently bent trickster who toys with people because he can, because he must. The story is localized, too. Brandon never leaves Brightburn, his Kansas hometown. And his victims don't range too far from home, either. The film also introduces no real foil for Brandon. The conflict is between love and hate, but never within him. There's never any question as to which side will win. Tensions are low even as bloodshed is high, and the movie just never does manage to find any real hook, sense of scope, or feel for conflict."
William Friedkin's serial-killer procedural Cruising - which is getting a special-edition release from Arrow Video - remains the ugliest and most unpleasant film of Friedkin's career (and yes, I have seen the movie where the evil tree eats children. As far back as his Boys in the Band, Friedkin's been no stranger to controversy, but I don't think he courted it as aggressively as he did with Cruising. Released just before the start of the AIDS crisis, Cruising imagines homosexual culture in New York City as a disorienting, nightmarish farrago of vice and inequity, and that's even before a murderer begins raping and butchering young gay men. Friedkin notoriously shot almost an hour of graphic sexual content that Warner Bros. demanded he cut (and frankly, after hearing about some of the edited footage, you kinda can't blame the studio), but the finished result still feels raw and confrontational. Friedkin uses all sorts of tricks to heighten the many club sequences (sped-up images; a surreal flashing effect to approximate the moment when the poppers kick in), and he shoots the murders in a way that still horrifies, intercutting gory stabbings with quick inserts of actual pornography. You can't blame the gay community for accusing Friedkin of demonizing them; it does not help that Friedkin implies this lifestyle "turns" the tortured young cop (Al Pacino, in a fascinatingly blank performance) assigned to find the killer. Cruising will never not be a problematic piece of work. But for all its faults and lapses in good taste, the film maintains this compulsive, hypnotic power. As a piece of direction, it's masterful. You get the sense that Friedkin wanted to make an American giallo, so pervasive are Cruising's surrealist leanings (I haven't even mentioned the half-naked cowboy), and while one might (rightly) question using such a pulpy genre form to tackle this delicate a subject matter, I can't deny that Friedkin has full control over his audience's emotions. For better and for worse, there's never been another film quite like Cruising.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "Friedkin's revisionist tendencies may have gotten the better of him. The film's underlying plot conceit is that a straight cop named Steve Burns (Al Pacino) is sent undercover into 'gay territory' to try to ferret out who has been serial killing gays. In both video and audio sleight of hand which is detailed in one of the archival featurettes, Friedkin actually kind of toys with the audience, utilizing actors who resemble each other, and in fact even using a 'victim' from an early killing as the 'perpetrator' in a later murder, and then dubbing all of the actors with the same voice, all of which adds up to some pretty willful misdirection which no doubt led some viewers to assuming who was doing all the killing. And yet Friedkin never really 'solves' this whodunit, leaving things open to interpretation, something that further enraged some in 'the community,' since it seemed to be a blanket condemnation of gays in general. Friedkin's motives may have been relatively pure in making Cruising, but the result can't help but feel exploitative at times, and that may be the biggest issue contemporary viewers will have with it. The fact that a variety of both cast and crew evidently had major problems with the film themselves is also probably testament to the fact that Cruising probably takes a few too many detours to ever arrive anywhere too convincingly"
Almost as frightening as Cruising is Nicolas Roeg's infamous adaptation of The Witches. Maybe you think that I'm being glib, that a PG-rated Roald Dahl fantasy doesn't warrant comparison with a violent thriller about an unhinged serial killer. To that, I would say, you probably haven't seen The Witches. For a whole generation of people, The Witches was the first children's story they encountered to state, and in no uncertain terms, that the world has teeth and will eat you if you're not careful. Dahl was never one to shy from the macabre, but The Witches weaponizes his oft-lurid instincts directly against young people: he invents a global cabal of witches who like nothing more than to torture and devour kids. And that's why Roeg was the perfect person to direct a Witches movie. Whether we're talking about his bizarre/brilliant David Bowie showcase The Man Who Fell to Earth or his gruesome morality play Eureka, Roeg revels in the outré, and he works with the Jim Henson Creature Shop to give his witches such ghoulish menace. Disguised, they look like normal women, yet Roeg and his DP Harvey Harrison use fish-eye lenses and canted angle to distort these villains, making their faces stretch and leer. And when unmasked...well, the phrase, "Terrifying, Sentient Melting Candle" comes to mind. Of the film's witchy horde, none is scarier than Anjelica Huston's Grand High Witch: it's a virtuoso performance that lets Huston go arch and ridiculous before snapping back into unspeakable evil with python-like speed (not for nothing, but Huston won awards from the L.A. Film Critics and National Society of Film Critics Associations, and she probably should have gotten an Oscar nomination, too). Huston is so good she can't help but overwhelm the film's nominal hero - Jasen Fisher's meek Luke - but that's kinda the point. Roeg wants his baddies to ensnare us, and Huston cranks up her menace until we recoil from the screen. Only the studio-mandated happy ending compromises Roeg's achievement.
Randy Miller III's Blu-ray review noted that "the story…attempts to balance mystery, drama, and horror in ways rarely seen inside a family movie...even by 1990 standards, when shadowy magic and fantasy escapism were still all the rage. This balance is maintained most of the time, although I daresay The Witches runs viewers through the wringer a little too much. The film's second act is its biggest culprit; specifically, a drawn-out sequence inside the hotel's convention hall where young Luke makes that fateful discovery mentioned above. The reveal and subsequent 'turning point' goes on a little too long, leaving precious little room for the mouse-led adventure that dominated the film's promotional ads and poster artwork back in 1990 and even extended to all of its home video releases (including this one). It makes me even more curious about what was cut out, although another softened element still remains: a re-shot ending, which differs greatly from Dahl's book and reportedly led the author to request his name be removed completely. Producer Jim Henson bought the film rights in 1983 and hand-picked Roeg to direct this adaptation. This was a risky move for two reasons: Roeg's most successful films were more than a decade old at this point, and he'd never directed anything aimed at younger viewers. Yet Roeg's menacing visual style, sharpened from a decade of cinematography before co-directing his first film in 1970, is what made him a unique choice for the project."
Finally, Cohen Media Group is releasing the third volume in its series of restored Buster Keaton films: this time around, we're getting Seven Chances and Battling Butler. I don't know if I'd rank either film as one of Keaton's stone masterworks (neither is as inventive as a Sherlock Jr. or as ambitious as a The General), but the two pictures might rank as his most sheerly enjoyable. We so rightly brand Keaton an artist that we forget about his dead-on commercial instincts, and Seven Chances and Battling Butler are as close as he'd get to crafting four-quadrant entertainment. Seven Chances is practically the first high-concept romantic comedy! In it, Keaton learns he's to inherent a fortune provided he gets married by his twenty-seventh birthday. With less than a day on the clock, he's got to avoid potential suitors and woo his true love (Ruth Dwyer), and I tell you: you'd have to do very little tweaking to get this thing up to code for a mid-90's rom-com (in fact, The Bachelor did just that). As per usual, what redeems the formula are the gags, and Keaton crafts some indelible ones, most notably his fleeing down a hill full of rolling boulders. If Seven Chances is a rom-com, Battling Butler is his sports movie. Here, Keaton is a sensitive lad who pretends to be a fearsome boxer...except he doesn't quite account for coming face-to-face with the real fighter. What results is one of the great movie fight scenes - it's so tough and funny and brutal that no less an authority on screen violence than Martin Scorsese exclaimed "the only person who had the right attitude about boxing in the movies for me was Buster Keaton." The fights in Battling Butler have a different aesthetic than the Raging Bull brawls, but they share the same unpredictable ferocity.