Cruel Jaws (1995)

People get really bent out of shape over movie remakes, especially these days.  Every time a remake is even rumored, the internet practically explodes with people bitching and moaning about how it’s going to suck and about how this is “raping their childhood” (a gripe as invalid as it is overblown).  Personally, I’m of two minds on the subject.  On the one hand, I understand some of the complaints, primarily as they relate to the dearth of ideas in Hollywood.  I would love to see more original material developed, see new characters and franchises for us to love as much as those of the past (and let’s be honest, most of this grousing comes from nostalgia).  That studio execs just don’t get it is frustrating (in much the same way that the thinking that the higher an action film’s budget is, the better a film it is, which is not only patently false but also distressing for how many low- to mid- budget films they could produce with that same money; but this shit makes billions, and money talks).  

Do I feel that a remake of Escape from New York is warranted (and I won’t even touch subjects like the recasting of characters with actors of different races, genders, et cetera here)?  No, but I also have the option of ignoring it and any of the changes it makes to Carpenter’s original.  That’s something that people just don’t seem to get; speak with your dollars.  If you don’t want to see any of these profligate reboots, don’t pay to see them.  Don’t watch them at all.  But more importantly, don’t whinge on endlessly about how offended you are by them.  There’s nothing wrong with voicing your disapproval, but it’s unnecessary and, frankly, boorish to carry on the way many folks do.  And that’s the other side of my thinking.  I have no problems with stating that I’m disinterested in a particular remake, but I don’t dwell on it and overreact about it as if any of this has any concrete impact on the course of my life or the turning of the Earth.  If anything, one of my biggest quibbles anymore is that I now have to clarify which version of a film I’m talking about, and this is becoming more and more frequent.  But it doesn’t kill my love for any of the originals, and I can always go back and watch them instead of a remake.  Try it sometime.  You might find yourself a little happier for it (or at least a little less bitter).

A group of Cuban salvage divers scope out the wreck of the USS Cleveland looking to haul up some major booty.  Of course, there’s a massive shark down there who kills them all.  Cut to: marine biologist Billy (Gregg Hood) and girlfriend Vanessa (Norma J Nesheim), who arrive in Hampton Bay, Florida for vacation (including “disco dancing ‘til dawn,” and this is in 1995, folks).  Visiting pal Dag Sorensen (Richard Dew, who will forever be viewed as a poor man’s Hulk Hogan lookalike) and his family at their little aquarium, Billy becomes enmeshed in Dag’s struggle against greedy land developer Sam Lewis (George Barnes Jr) as well as local sheriff Francis’ (David Luther) quest to rid his waters of this “anomalous” man-eater.

Bruno Mattei’s (hiding out under the William Snyder nom de guerre) Cruel Jaws (aka The Beast aka Jaws 5) is an amazing thing to behold.  Don’t misunderstand, this is as incompetent a film as Mattei has ever turned out (possibly moreso).  The editing is confusing, even when it’s not being used to attempt to fool us into thinking that the shark attack scenes are in any way exciting.  For instance, Francis goes to talk to Mayor Godfrey (who looks like a cross between Trace Beaulieu and the frantic television station manager at the beginning of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead) and Sam (why Sam is there at all is anyone’s guess) about closing the beaches, and in the middle of their conversation, they go from standing around Godfrey’s office to standing on a balcony outside.  This particular technique has been used before in many good films, but here it makes no sense.  Their conversation isn’t long enough or in-depth enough to believe that they would continue it outside and at a locale which also gives the impression that these are just bros hanging out (which they’re not).  Some of the shots in the film don’t even give us actual visuals in any sort of continuity (and it’s not as if this is some type of art film…or maybe it is?); they’re just cuts to something and then cut away from.  It’s a hatchet job.

In the grand tradition of Italian genre filmmaking, we also get the inclusion of odd bits of business which we’re supposed to believe are A) of any importance to the story and B) not dumb (often simultaneously).  The perfect example of this is the subplot of Dag’s paraplegic daughter Susie (Kirsten Urso).  She swims with the dolphins at the aquarium and even has a pet seal.  Her aquatic antics are set to the most rodeo-clown-esque, slide-whistle-abusing, offputting music imaginable.  Otherwise, she passes comments about punching sharks which are meant to be cute and endearing.  They’re not, and she’s not.  We also have the subplot of Sam’s douche bag son Ronnie (Carter Collins, a dime store Nick Cassavetes if ever there was one), getting enraged, trying to poison Susie’s dolphins, and generally being an asshole.  There’s the subplot of Dag’s son Bob (Scott Silveria) and Sam’s daughter Gloria (Natasha Etzer) falling in love and emoting in some of the most baldfaced dialogue ever written.  And the capper is the inclusion of Sam’s Italian “business partners” from New York, who come to us by way of Central Casting.  One of the more intriguing elements of the film is the inclusion of Glenda (Sky Palma), a bleached blonde insane woman who just wants to party (including, but not limited to, kneeing a friend in the balls while dancing with him; Jocularity!) and kill sharks.  Does all of this seem like a lot to include in a movie ostensibly about a large fish terrorizing a small coastal town?  You bet.  In fact, the shark and its entire plot barely get any screen time until about the last third.  Consequently, Cruel Jaws is a meandering slog to get through, even after everyone and their brother decide to take a swing at the shark (an editorial decision that only makes the film feel longer than it is), and this kills what dipshitty enjoyment I got from the first third, because it took me that long to realize that this thing was just film being passed through a camera. 

Of course, no conversation about this film can take place without mention of its stunning appropriation of not only the footage from several Jaws films (as well as some from L’ultimo Squalo and Deep Blood, as I’ve read) but also their plot points and even their dialogue.  In fact, most of my notes on this thing are just notations of moments stolen from that other franchise.  Witness: Gloria taunts Bob with the line, “Do you always do what your dad tells you to do?” (Jaws 2).  Billy expounds about how all sharks do is “swim, eat, and make baby sharks” (Jaws).  Francis says that their shark is “a perfect machine” (Jaws).  There is the prank played on a couple necking in the water by their pals, which involves a megaphone and the impersonation of authority figures (Jaws 3D).  A character inexplicably lifts an open can of gas over their head just before the idiot next to them fires off a flare gun, causing their boat to explode (Jaws 2).  These are just a few instances in a film positively littered with direct lifts.  The filmmakers throw in some horse shit about the origin of the shark (which, incidentally, is a tiger shark, not a great white, but even this is taken from the original Jaws and its famous “A whaaat?” scene), but no matter which way you cut it, Cruel Jaws is a hot mess trying to disguise itself as a movie in much the same way that the Land Shark from the classic Saturday Night Live skit tried to disguise itself as a plumber.  

MVT:  For all its deficiencies, I did enjoy watching Glenda be unhinged and eat up every shred of scenery around her.  It doesn’t hurt any that Palma’s pretty cute.

Make or Break:  The Break for me was the moment Susie showed up aqua-dancing with her dolphin friends.  I knew at that point that she was going to be cloyingly saccharine and involved in way more of the film than she should be.

Score:  5.75/10

Crystalbrain (1970)

Sir Cliffton Reynolds (or maybe Reynold Cliffton according to the subtitles I had, but either way he’s played by Eduardo Fajardo) is a London judge plagued with intense headaches of late.  Dr. Chalmers (Frank Wolff) tells Cliff that he has about six months left to live, but the good doctor also has a possible solution.  Chalmers suggests that what Cliff needs is a new brain, comparing his proposed procedure to the transplanting of primate hearts into humans.  Cue Ginetto Lamberti (Simón Andreu), a working man who currently lies dying in the street, but whose brain is in perfect (this is subjective) working order.  But will this transplant prove to be a transmigration of Ginetto’s soul, or just an excuse for Cliff to go insane?

Juan Logar’s Crystalbrain (aka L’uomo Dal Cervello Di Cristallo aka Trasplante De Un Cerebro) is an amalgamation of genres.  It owes as much to gialli as it does to science fiction, as it does to psychothrillers, as it does to horror.  What it harks back specifically to, however, is the classic The Hands of Orlac and its profligate progeny.  The earlier story concerns a pianist who has the hands of a murderer grafted onto his arms, and the “influence” the hands begin to exert on his psyche.  This conceit, that a foreign body part introduced onto/into a “normal” person having a deleterious effect, is an intriguing one.  It plays both as a straight horror paradigm and as an investigation of pure human nature.  Most people like to think that they are, at heart, good.  But what if you were given an excuse to unleash your id, to behave in a way antithetical to your public personality?  Characters in these types of stories believe so deeply that their transplants have power, they allow their personae to transform, and rarely for the better.  Their darkest aspects rise to the forefront.  Many times, they become obsessed with discovering why their transplant died or with taking revenge on those who killed them.  Who, then, is the true personality?  The one who existed before the operation or the one who was created afterward?  Was one just masking the other?  Cliff appears to be a decent person before his procedure.  He believes that “justice balances right and wrong.”  He loves his wife Susan (Nuria Torray) and his brother Peter (Angel del Pozo).  While he doesn’t turn evil after the transplant, Cliff certainly becomes more than a little unhinged.  One way to look at the ensuing events in his life is that his sense of morality intensifies and drives him to find closure in the name of Ginetto by appropriating the Italian fisherman’s psyche.

In this same way, there is the notion that transplants actually do have power over the transplantee.  In these cases, the fantastic element raises issues of identity and loss of same, perhaps even more than looking at it through a purely psychological lens.  The introduction of organs not our own suggests an invasion of our body (in fact, that’s exactly what it is), an attack on who we are.  The invader is usually malignant in nature and more powerful than the host body.  The transplant typically proceeds in wreaking havoc on the transplantee’s life and loved ones, and there is nothing the weaker of the two can do because, through the process of the transplant, they are, by definition, no longer wholly themselves.  Their identity is no longer their own because their bodies are no longer their own, strictly speaking.  In Crystalbrain, this idea is a bit easier to believe because the human brain is the whole of our conscious being.  Our hands may be adept at a certain skill, but that’s because our mind has trained them to be so.  Naturally, this trope also implies in some way that muscle memory goes further than being the unconscious ability to perform constantly repeated tasks.  Here, pieces of the donor contain the active personality (or aspects of the personality) of the donor.  The transplantee, being in a weakened state, is possessed through these parts.  It’s a bit like The Thing in that every piece of a donor contains the whole of him/herself.  

We, as an audience, may or may not buy any of this under normal circumstances.  A hand or a kidney is truly nothing more than a machine (or a part of a machine) without a power source.  Nonetheless, the big question that comes up in this film is how does Chalmers not consider that Cliff’s personality would be completely changed by his operation?  When questioned about this (“Do you think it’s morally responsible to destroy a soul to heal a body?”), he simply states that doctors have to stave off death whenever they can.  But he’s not saving Cliff’s life.  If anything, he’s saving Ginetto’s life by giving him Cliff’s body.  What the hell kind of medical professional do you have to be to not understand that?  The only way to explain it is that Chalmers believes that our psyche (or here, our “soul”) resides in our whole body, not just in our skulls (and he’s supposedly a man of science).  Frankly, he never should have been given a medical license, but what can you do?  

Logar and company deal with the disparate personalities of Cliff and Ginetto in a stylistically interesting way.  During Cliff’s surgery, he flashes back to the many people on whom he has passed judgment, and they each appear in double exposure alongside Cliff as he pronounces sentence.  They are voiceless; Cliff is in power, and his sense of justice is secure.  Later, when Cliff visits the cemetery where Ginetto’s body is buried, he envisions a series of people who are directly in his and Ginetto’s lives (Chalmers, Susan, Ginetto himself, et cetera), again in double exposure, and they all call out to him.  They are now tormenting Cliff.  He is no longer in control of his life or his being, but justice must still be served.  The duality of Cliff and Ginetto is tied together in this simple way, and I felt it was fairly successful.  

The editing of the film is also fragmented.  Time and space change in a heartbeat with little to no establishment of what’s going on or when these events take place.  Like the Crystalbrain of the title, not only is Cliff’s mind fragile, ready to be shattered, but the cinematic world these characters inhabit is equally splintered.  It’s an off-kilter approach, and it reflects what Cliff is going through.  He’s uncertain of who he is (right up until he’s certain, yet even then…).  His mind is unreliable, and the film’s construction is equally untrustworthy (although, as with so many foreign films of this ilk and time period, we can’t be completely certain how many editors’ hands this passed through), forcing us to fill in blanks and play catch up; essentially placing us in the protagonist’s shoes to some small degree or another.  Admittedly, the film is headscratching in its logic, and Cliff acts in a manner easy to disbelieve, even with all that’s happening to him.  It treats its supporting characters like props more than people, and I think this robs the film of the impact it may have had.  Even at eighty-five minutes, the story is not particularly well-paced, either.  And yet, it stands out among its peers, even if only as a curiosity rather than a revelation.

MVT:  The approach to the narrative is distinctive and interesting, and I would guess that the filmmakers at least tried to tell their story in a unique fashion.

Make or Break:  The scene in the cemetery, where Cliff (or Ginetto, depending on your perspective) hallucinates (or does he?).

Score:  6.5/10    

Scarecrows (1988)

William Wesley’s Scarecrows opens in media res.  Curry (Michael Simms) and his band of commandos have just robbed a military base of three-point-five million dollars.  They have also taken hostage Al (David Campbell) and his daughter Kellie (Victoria Christian), and, of course, they’re dog Dax (Dax Vernon), and they are using the family as getaway airplane pilots (let’s never mind how the Unites States military is completely unable to track the aircraft; it doesn’t matter).  After Bert (B.J. Turner) robs his fellow robbers of their loot and parachutes out of the plane, the gang give chase.  But the secluded, rural area they land in is watched over by something that doesn’t take too kindly to their intrusion (okay, it’s the titular scarecrows).

I’ve thought about robbing a bank.  I’m positive just about everyone on Earth has at some point or another.  I’m sure it’s not easy, but it also has the allure of being better than real work (or at least the kind of work where you have to punch a clock for eight or more hours a day and answer to The Man).  The thing that holds most folks back from doing it is the danger (coincidentally, also the reason it’s attractive to some).  It’s a risky business once you point a gun at someone and demand all the money in their vault.  Will they acquiesce, or will they resist and attack (doubtful, but there’s always that wild card)?  Then there’s the whole angle of the money being traceable, the ability to actually make good your escape, the resources needed to hideout and possibly even have to assume a new identity (on paper, if nothing else).  A person, therefore, has to weigh the risks versus the rewards, because even if you get clear with the money, there will always be stumbling blocks, big and small, any of which can wind up with you either spending time in the pokey or spending time in a grave (but only one of these has the possibility of your eventual release, except in horror films like Scarecrows).  And that’s why, for me, I’d rather just work some overtime to make ends meet.

Scarecrows are looked upon as being several things, symbolically speaking.  They are primarily protectors in most of the public consciousness.  They guard crops from scavengers, but they also guard (or used to guard) villages from pillagers, because they give the illusion of a live person standing guard.  Their motionlessness has an offputting quality when viewed from a distance, and their slack, faceless heads can be just as disquieting for what a viewer projects onto them.  Scarecrows are also regarded, according to Carl Jung, as belonging to The Shadow aspect of the human psyche.  This is a part of our personality that lies in the unconscious, and what it reflects, in part, is the darkness within us (I’m really, really simplifying here).  Both of these facets are at play in this film.

On the one hand, the scarecrows in the film are guardians of the Fowler land (I don’t recall the family actually being named in the film, but they are listed as such in the credits).  Their house, their ancient Ford F100, the ground it’s all built on, is sacred to them.  There are three crosses, supposedly indicating where the three Fowler men are buried, and at least one scarecrow stands vigil at this site (we’re never given a clear geography of where all of the scarecrows are, whether they circumscribe the property or are interspersed throughout it, et cetera).  When the bank robbers land on the premises, they violate the sanctity of the Fowlers’ property (the fact that the family is also buried there only magnifies this violation).  Nevertheless, unlike actual scarecrows, the ones in this movie aren’t there only as visual deterrents.  They are punishment for wrongdoing, and the commandos have transgressed fourfold.  First, they stole what didn’t belong to them.  Second, they killed military personnel during commission of their crime.  Third, they kidnapped innocent people to aid in their escape (probably the least serious of their offenses).  Fourth, they trespassed where they didn’t belong.  All of these things are punishable by death in the film, but the last of them is the most egregious from the perspective of the antagonists.  The reason I say this is because even Al and Kellie are candidates for victimhood, though they committed no crimes in the eyes of the law.  The Fowlers are just protecting what’s theirs, but they also serve tangentially as retribution for injustices outside the scope of their land.

On the other hand, the scarecrows are totems of the bad in humanity.  There is some reference to the Fowlers possibly being into Satanism or some other occult hoodoo, and the scarecrows are avatars of this evil, unable to die, cursed to inhabit their estate for eternity.  Similar to their role as executioners for the guilty, they are also reflections of the Shadow within the human characters.  After all, the commandos are not especially nice people, and their inner ugliness is essentially projected outward, manifesting as the scarecrows which hack up their victims and transform them into scarecrows as well.  The scarecrows make concrete this unconscious aspect of the characters’ psyches.

I remember seeing this film way back when it first hit VHS, and at the time, I really liked it.  Viewing it today, through more critical eyes, I can see its flaws much more clearly.  The acting is a little sketchy (with Simms basically imitating Joe Pilato from Day of the Dead) but not as horrendous as it could be.  The characters themselves are individuated enough to be distinct, though they’re really not too terribly interesting (and I was surprised that of all of them, Kellie, the one who should be the most sympathetic, is the one who is the most one-dimensional).  But my biggest problem with the film is its first half (actually closer to first two-thirds).  It has a decent setup that draws you in, but once everyone hits the ground, the film becomes a series of scenes of the cast wandering around in the woods talking and not saying anything of any consequence whatsoever or propelling the minimal plot forward.  These scenes are punctuated (I suppose you could say bookmarked, but they really feel more arbitrary than that) with many (many, many) closeup shots of the scarecrows just hanging out.  These moments are meant to build dread and to mount anticipation for the ineluctable jump scares/kill scenes, but they honestly just become tiresome after so much screen time is wasted on them.  That said, the final half hour or more of the film does begin to pick up, and the filmmakers finally do start to give us some intriguing scenarios and interactions.  If only they had worked harder to do the same for the rest of the picture leading up to this point.  Scarecrows is still a mildly entertaining horror film, but its strengths also serve to heavily underscore its weaknesses.

MVT:  The makeup effects in this are impressive, and the scarecrows each have a look that is visually striking.  The gore also works quite well, and there are some truly gruesome moments that help keep things a bit lively.

Make or Break:  The opening sequence on the plane nicely sets up what’s going on and what’s coming up, even with some silly moments like a grenade that would have exploded long before anyone is able to get to it and a character casually playing his harmonica while smoke fills the plane’s interior (as you do).

Score:  6.25/10