Project: Metalbeast (1995)

At the heart of all the great werewolf stories is the tragedy of the lycanthrope’s condition.  Usually, these characters didn’t ask for what’s happening to them (in fact, Oliver Reed’s character in The Curse of the Werewolf is just that; cursed by happenstance of birth).  Oftentimes, they are wracked with angst prior to their “infection”/transformation, and their lycanthropy amplifies this, creates a visual metaphor for dealing with it, and generates pathos which makes their typically tragic endings more impactful.  We feel bad when Lon Chaney, Jr is killed with almost Shakespearean poignancy in 1941’s The Wolf Man, because he’s basically a nice guy.  We feel bad when Dee Wallace sacrifices herself at the end of The Howling, because after all she’s gone through, we want her to live, but we know that she has to die.  Even villainous werewolves who are not the protagonists of their stories normally embody a certain sense of anxiety centered on their duality.  Just look at Everett McGill’s character in Silver Bullet who has nightmares about his loss of morality/control.  All of this is rooted in the injustice of these people’s situations.  They don’t generally deserve their lot in life (hey, who does?), so we sympathize with what they’re going through.  However, in Alessandro De Gaetano’s Project: Metalbeast, Butler (John Marzilli) was an unsympathetic piece of shit even before his self-inflicted transformation.  Consequently, his werewolf is nothing more than a lumbering beast we don’t care about as anything other than a killing machine, and I think it robs the film of the resonance it could have had.  Of course, none of the other characters are all that compelling either, so I suppose there’s some sense of balance in that.

After injecting himself with werewolf blood obtained in Budapest for a top secret super soldier project, Butler, a soldier working under the shifty Colonel Miller (Barry Bostwick), wolfs out, is put down with three silver bullets, and is placed into a cryogenic deep freeze.  Twenty years on, his cadaver is thawed out to test Dr. Anna De Carlo’s (Kim Delaney) unstable artificial skin, called Bio-Ferron (just to reinforce this for you, they have an artificial epidermis that has the UNINTENDED side effect of turning into metal, and they called it Bio-Ferron), under the orders of the still-shifty Miller.  I wonder if Butler will awaken and go on some kind of rampage?

One of the more interesting things at play in this film is its combination of science with myth.  In the same way that some science fiction fantasy stories (a la Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane stories or Thundarr the Barbarian) merge grungy, bloody barbarianism with high tech, almost aseptic futurism, the dichotomy of juxtaposing science with the supernatural holds a certain appeal for me.  It’s the incongruities of the two, the core polarities that I find fascinating.  There is some de-mythologizing of lycanthropy in the film as the condition of werewolfism is treated as a rare blood condition rather than as a curse or disease passed from one victim to the next (even the military wouldn’t be foolish enough to purposely infect soldiers whose combat efficiency they wish to enhance with a known malady [or would they?], although this does call to mind the shameful Tuskegee Study [which took place over a span of forty years!]).  Werewolves are simply something that exist (and that they do so in secret bolsters the conflict between comprehension and the incomprehensible).  Yet, the filmmakers don’t deal with any of this in anything other than a superficial manner.  The elements are all there, but De Gaetano seems to be more intent on making a straight up creature feature (not that there’s anything wrong with that) than on exploring the depths of the sandbox in which he was playing.

There is also some toying with notions of morality, but even here, it’s essentially cursory.  Naturally, Miller has no moral or ethical code whatsoever (“morality has nothing to do with it”), because he’s both a government employee for an unnamed, clandestine branch as well as a soldier, and we know that these two things spell mercenary in cinematic terms.  The doctors (who are also government employees) are innately moral, because their stated purpose is to help cancer and burn victims and they work out in the open (more or less).  They want to heal people, whereas Miller wants to hurt people.  Even the soldier Philip (Dean Scofield) who works with the doctors is himself a doctor, so he shares their clear moral code, and General Hammond (William G Clark) is upfront about his distaste for the likes of Miller (“people in Washington have no regard for humanity”).  The doctors also hang out, drink beers, and play poker in their off hours, so the audience recognizes that these are regular folks just like them.  Despite all this, the doctors don’t display the courage of their convictions.  They raise token ethical/moral arguments, but they go along with Miller’s plan with little prodding, and then everything is business as usual for them.  Even after Butler comes back to life, they have very little compassion for the guy (granted, he doesn’t deserve it, but they don’t know that) outside of the frustration of snapping off needles while trying to give him injections.  

Nevertheless, when Project: Metalbeast is all boiled down, it’s by the numbers right down the line.  The characters are indistinguishable from one another and undeveloped outside of their designation as “the good guys.”  The same goes for Miller, who is a cardboard evildoer, always turning up to overhear some suspicious dialogue and deliver some vaguely menacing lines of his own.  The Metalbeast (played in costume by Kane Hodder) is a chunky, blank slate of a monster that looks more like a mutant hedgehog than an iron werewolf.  There are no unforeseen twists to the story.  There are no especially clever moments for any of the characters in their combatting of the monster.  

And speaking of the lack of cleverness, the film is rife with just dumb moments and decisions.  To wit: why does Miller suddenly think that Butler will obey him now simply because twenty years have gone by?  Why does he have no method to control what is basically a feral animal (it’s declared that the amalgamated soldier would have the brain of a man, but this is not in evidence anywhere) which he wants to use it in combat.  Why is Miller not armed to the teeth with silver bullets or have any underlings with him similarly kitted out?  Why does Miller show Butler photos of the initial werewolf eating Butler’s fellow soldier in Budapest, when Butler clearly didn’t give a fuck about that guy in the first place (and why is this so effective on Butler, then?)?  Why do they seem to keep Butler’s frozen corpse in the kitchen refrigerator?  Why does Chef Ramon (Mario Burgos) get third billing in the end credits (they’re only partially in alphabetical order) after a single, histrionic scene (which, by the way, wins the Robert Marius Award for the film)?  Even discounting any of this (or reveling in it, for that matter), the film watching experience with this one was basic in every aspect for me, not in an old school, throwback sort of way but in an ultra-generic one.  It was just nothing to howl about (and by the way, the Metalbeast never howls in the film).

MVT:  I like the Metalbeast, not because it’s in any way memorable, but because it’s a practical monster suit, and I’m a sucker for practical monster suit effects.  A backhanded compliment if ever there was one, I suppose.

Make or Break:  The Budapest werewolf attack has another practical suit monster, which I quite liked, and it was gory (I should state, there’s quite a bit of gore in the film that provides a tiny amount of satisfaction).  And that’s that.

Score:  5.5/10

Body Parts (1991)

Cinematic violence is big (for our purposes here I’m talking about scope, not popularity).  Usually.  It’s supposed to be.  It’s cinematic.  Audiences love watching people slug it out, every hit telegraphed from a mile back, and every strike exploding on the soundtrack like cannon fire (which, incidentally, is what was used to create the sounds of guns firing in the classic Western Shane).  It’s not enough that someone gets shot.  They have to be all but cut in half by a fusillade of ammunition, viscera splattering thither and yon.   And often, we accept that not only do the onscreen protagonists make it through such punishment, but can then go on to kick even more ass and win the day (witness: Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, and so on, ad nauseum).  But by that same token, audiences do not generally have a personal reaction to these acts, mainly because they rarely have any basis for empathy with them.  Which is why when you see John McClane pulling a shard of glass out of the bottom of his bare foot in the aforementioned John McTiernan film, you cringe a little bit.  You probably have not been shot at and pummeled by international criminals, but it’s almost guaranteed you’ve stepped on something sharp with your bare feet.  We can watch a man be cut in twain with a samurai sword and not bat an eye, but if that same guy burns his hand on a hot pan, we react with him.  It’s this empathic bond which exemplifies, I think, the true power of cinema, its ideal potential.  So, when I see the raw stitching on Bill’s (Jeff Fahey) arm in Eric Red’s Body Parts, yeah, I wince a little.  But it also helps draw me into and tether me to a world that’s going to get pretty crazy pretty fast.

Bill is a criminal psychologist whose focus is the roots of violence in mankind.  Despite his misgivings about his purpose, he has a happy home life with his wife Karen (Kim Delaney) and his two kids.  A horrific traffic accident sends Bill to the hospital, and Karen is told by Dr. Webb (Lindsay Duncan) that Bill will lose his right arm unless they do an immediate transplant, which of course happens.  Though the recovery goes well, Bill’s life is about to take a decided downturn, since the new arm used to belong to the recently executed multiple murderer Charles Fletcher (John Walsh).  

On one level, the film deals with male feelings of ineffectuality.  Bill is first confronted with this in the character of Ray (Paul Ben-Victor), a convict on death row who knows that he does bad things, but he can’t stop himself.  He pleads with Bill to “rewire” him, something both men know is a physical and medical impossibility (though the fantasy of overcoming this obstacle is part of what the film is about in this regard).  The seeds of self-doubt are planted in Bill, and when he talks to his wife about it, she consoles him and gives him a kiss.  After Bill is given Charley’s arm, things change a bit.  Where he and Karen are only shown kissing in bed pre-accident, Bill uses his new arm (the only arm he uses actively in the scene) to pleasure his wife, and after the two have what we can handily infer was phenomenal sex, their romantic relationship is magically reinvigorated.  Remo Lacey (Brad Dourif) is a painter who, until he received Charley’s other arm, could only paint quaint landscapes and “starving artist” material, fit only for bank and hotel room walls.  After, his paintings are nightmarish depictions of Charley’s murder memories and wild moneymakers for Lacey.  Mark (Peter Murnik) lost his legs and his ability to play basketball, but after the grafts, he plays (so we’re led to believe) better than he ever did before and at a nigh superhuman level.   Before their surgeries these men were mediocre, at best.  Following their replacement surgeries, each man’s life reaches new, if only transient heights.  These men need the influence of a primal, alpha male like Charley to bring out their true potential, to overcome the inadequacies bred into them and, by extension, all modern men.  That this potential has the dark side effect of awakening the more violent aspects of a person is telling.  It’s the struggle between the poet and the warrior in man without being able to find a balance.  Peace can only come once both sides have been totally conquered.

The film does posit, at least on a surface level, that the visions Bill sees and the changes in his behavior are possibly stemming from something flagitious which was always inside him.  Of course, this would also have to extend to Remo and Mark, and though that is a possibility, it strains the suspension of disbelief in the film.  Odd, isn’t it, that a viewer who has difficulty accepting that three unrelated men share a psychosis will completely swallow that the evil of a homicidal maniac lives on in his transplanted flesh?  Perhaps this is because the former is too coincidental for believability, while the latter is fantastic enough that it piques much more interest.  This relates back to the influence which the multiple cinematic variations on Maurice Renaud’s Les Mains d’Orlac (aka The Hands Of Orlac), as well as films like Oliver Stone’s The Hand, and even Doris Wishman’s The Amazing Transplant have on this film.  Naturally to rational people, the idea that a personality not only lives inside the cells of a body but can also achieve self-awareness and manipulate another one is scatterbrained.  Still, if you think about it long enough, you can throw around some fairly interesting possibilities with the topic, and so long as you entertain any of them for a at least a few moments, they do gain some sort of credibility (at least in those few moments they do).  So, you can believe in something like the transmigration of the human soul or the existence of the human soul at all.  You can ponder whether a person’s anima does, indeed, dwell within one’s mind or if the mind is an encompassment of the body in total, a gestalt made physical much like the aliens in John Carpenter’s The Thing.  See?  And when you do any of this, you have to admit that the notion of a serial killer’s transplanted limbs influencing the behavior of their recipients is not nearly as goofy as it might be at first blush.  It’s part of what makes this film work so well for me, and why I happily take the plunge once the film takes that third act turn into crazy town.  You should take the trip sometime, too.

MVT:  The screenplay is a classically smooth build up to a marvelously gonzo payoff, and each piece slots nicely into place along the way.  It does threaten to go off the rails at several points, but it never actually does (for me, at any rate).  In fact, I think it achieves a very tight balancing act.

Make Or Break:  Without giving away too much, the Make is the scene where Bill is cuffed while riding with (I love this name) Officer Sawchuck (Zakes Mokae) and taken on a super tense hellride.  It’s fantastic low budget Action filmmaking, while it also delivers surprises and moves the story into its next phase.  

Score:  7.5/10