Full Eclipse (1993)

Back in the 70s, Marvel Comics started grinding out horror-themed books (so did DC and other publishers, but they’re not our focus here).  They had published stories featuring monsters previously in titles like Tales to Astonish back in the 50s/60s, but the vast majority of those tales were focused on giant creatures, either manmade or alien-spawned (including the introduction of everybody’s favorite monosyllabic tree, Groot).  The plots also tended to be very formulaic, following the atom-age, science fiction tropes of the 50s.  This conservative approach to the genre was largely a result of the implementation of the Comics Code Authority, which tied the hands of creators and publishers alike (the impetus for the Authority and all that entails is really a subject for a much longer essay, though there has already been more than enough ink spilled about it, and you should be able to get the whole picture on that with just a few mouse clicks).

At any rate, the Code was loosened a bit in the 70s, and monsters like vampires and zombies were now allowed so long as they were “handled in the classic tradition.”  Up popped titles such as Monster of Frankenstein and Tomb of Dracula.  Taking their cues from the loosening of societal norms and the increased interest in things occult, characters like the Son of Satan and Ghost Rider soon emerged into the spotlight, as well as the even more unorthodox Man-Thing (a concept at once both a throwback to monster books of the past as well as [thanks, in my opinion, largely to writer Steve Gerber] a commentary on modern society and its ills).  Of course, all of this is a roundabout way to touch on the lycanthropic character of Jack Russell (get it?), who made his first appearance in a feature called Werewolf by Night in Marvel Spotlight #2 (he would graduate to his own eponymous title in short order).  The character was tragic in the way that most werewolf characters are tragic, but the creators (including Gerry Conway and Mike Ploog) managed to tie in not only mystical themes (with artifacts like the Darkhold Scrolls) but also superheroes, with everyone from Tigra to Spider-Man interacting at some point or another with Jack and company.  Naturally, this book and its brethren were like Pixie Sticks (read: retro-crack) to a young me, with its amalgamation of monsters and superheroics, and it’s this same flavor that initially interested me in Anthony Hickox’s Full Eclipse.

Max Dire (as in “dire wolf,” and played with granite inscrutability by Mario Van Peebles) is a tough cop who doesn’t follow the rules but knows how to get the job done.  After his partner Jimmy (Tony Denison) makes a miraculous recovery from life-threatening wounds but then starts displaying alarming preternatural abilities, Max encounters Adam Garou (as in “loup garou,” and played with granite inscrutability by Bruce Payne), the man behind it all.  Recognizing Max’s potential, Adam indoctrinates the young man into his personal army of werewolf cops, theoretically in order to wipe out crime.  But is the price of justice too high?

According to this movie, the short answer to that question is “no.”  Full Eclipse uses the classic set up of a cop who is good at heart but unorthodox in approach being tempted to move completely outside the system in order to clean up the streets.  Max is the sort of cop who will storm a hostage situation solo, plunge through a ventilation shaft, and take out the baddies using the twin .45s he brandishes (something I always like to think is in homage to characters like The Shadow, but we all know is actually in imitation of filmmakers like John Woo [though maybe Woo is homaging The Shadow?  Hmmmmm……]).  For however much of a rogue Max is, he still abides (somewhat) by the law.  Nevertheless, Adam and his crew are attractive to Max for several reasons.  One, they get rid of criminals permanently.  Two, they have more physical power than normal men.  Three, they are sexy (in fact, part of the reason Max gets involved with them at all is because Casey (Patsy Kensit) seduces him).  Naturally, all three of these reasons are also attractive to a great many male audience members (and some female audience members, I’m sure), thus there’s a strong inclination to identify with max and his dilemma in a wish fulfillment way.  The basic conflict of the film is posited as whether the ends justify the means, but this is also something which the filmmakers lose sight of as they go along, and by the fade out, they wind up negating almost the entirety of the film that came before it.  Without saying too much, this is the type of film that, even while it is trying to subvert expectations is also completely bowing to them.

What’s interesting about Adam and his pack is that they are scientifically manufactured werewolves.  This intermeshing of science fiction and monsters is another callback to my beloved Marvel horror comics (with characters like Morbius the Living Vampire) as well as 50s science fiction films like Them! and Tarantula.  Between this and the superhero aspects (they wear uniforms like costumes with a tiny bit of variety in color and design to distinguish them from each other, normal human weapons are generally ineffective against them, they even grow awkward knuckle-claws like Wolverine from The X-Men), if this film isn’t a love letter to comic books, I don’t know what is.  And like many comic book characters, Full Eclipse’s wolf powers come with a price.  The monster cops are essentially junkies.  They have to shoot up with Adam’s serum in order to kickstart their powers, and they have to continue to shoot up in order to maintain them (and their health in general).  This power is not something with which every character can successfully cope, and it causes burnout and self-destruction in some.  As Nietzsche said, “Beware that, when fighting monsters you yourself do not become a monster…for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”  This all relates back to the film’s primary question.  Is the risk worth the reward?  The audience knows the answer to this.  The film acts like it knows the answer to this.  But ultimately, it either truly doesn’t or it truly doesn’t care about it, because Hickox and company wanted to have their cake and eat it, too.  So, rather than being satisfying or unsatisfying on its own terms and based on the decisions its creators made, the film frustrates to some degree by trying to be both moralistic and cynical.  It’s still watchable for its individual elements, but damned if I can’t shake the feeling that it might not have been worth the effort and time spent.

MVT:  The action sequences are very well shot and edited (again, owing much to the then-popular genre films coming out of Hong Kong), with lots of gunshots, explosions, and slow motion keeping the excitement level cranked up high.

Make or Break:  Jimmy’s big action set piece works astonishingly well, in spite of (okay, maybe because of) its more ridiculous aspects (we’re talking tall fence leaping and bus surfing, amongst other things).  Even though the film’s script doesn’t stick the landing in the end, at least the action sequences do.

Score:  6.5/10      

The Redeemer (1976)

I have never been to a class reunion from either high school or college (yes, I went to college).  There was one a couple of years ago for my high school class, but the details got confusing about whether it was actually happening or not, so I’ll just say that this is the reason why I didn’t attend and not my indifference to revisiting the large majority of people with whom I attended school.  It’s not that I dislike any of them.  I got along with most everyone back then (or that’s the way I remember it).  But I know that I had little in common with those people back then, and I likely have even less in common with them now, so why waste a perfectly good drinking night hanging around a bunch of people to whom you have nothing substantive to say?  

I think this is something films get right, by and large.  When a character goes to a reunion, it’s usually under protest.  Commonly, their time in school was usually hellish, and it’s the tension between their resistance and the sea of people from their past (either completely unchanged in manner, looks, et cetera or totally different from the way they were, but rarely merely matured) that keeps the narrative afloat and works for generating some laughs or drama.  By that same token, they also make a great way to gather a bunch of unpleasant lowlifes together to in order to dispatch them in gruesome fashion.  And that’s what you get in Constantine S. Gochis’ The Redeemer (aka The Redeemer: Son of Satan aka Class Reunion Massacre).  Mostly.

Young Christopher (Christopher Flint) emerges from a dreary river and plods along a rural (read: dirt) road until a bus stops to take him to church, where he is a member of the choir (and you thought your parents’ whinging about having to walk to school ten miles in fifteen feet of snow wrapped only in newspapers was bad) and has to listen to the priest spew fire and brimstone interminably.  Meanwhile, six jerks make plans to attend their high school reunion, and very quickly discover that there is no open bar and their miserable lives are about to close.  Enter The Redeemer (T.G. Finkbinder)!      

This film is a something of a mishmash, and it’s this odd mixture of the supernatural and body county subgenres that I think will put some folks off it.  It’s interesting to me how this works as a slasher film, considering how early in the cycle it is (post-Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood and Bob Clark’s Black Christmas but pre-John Carpenter’s Halloween), and I think that’s largely because it relies more heavily on the “ten little murder victims” (amended for six here, naturally)/”old dark house” tropes than anything else.  There is a central location in which the characters are trapped.  This location acts as a labyrinth through which the characters must explore in order to keep the pace up, and it’s filled with dark spaces out of which the killer can emerge at any time.  The whole time, the characters are trying to piece together why any of this is happening and by whom, thus maintaining a sense of narrative that’s simply wafer thin.  

From the slasher side of the coin, the kill scenes are all interesting to some degree or another and varied enough to keep you in your seat to witness the next one.  You know who’s going to croak because they are ALWAYS the one who goes off by themselves to accomplish some task.  The characters are cardboard cutouts, none of whom one can find any reason to care about or be interested in even slightly (except for the drunkard Cindy [Jeannetta Arnette], but that’s largely because she’s so pathetic).  But there’s no reason behind any of this.  These folks were supposedly chosen because of their “perversions” and “debauchery” (one is a womanizer, one is a frigid bitch, one is a lesbian, and so on), yet they’re really no worse than a great many people walking the Earth as far as being “evil” or “sinful.”  So, why these six?  Why not the entire graduating class?  Practically speaking, the answer has to do with budgets and scope, but questions like this lingered in the back of my head the entire run time of the film.

The Redeemer also deals with the concept of masks in society.  Christopher is threatened with a knife in the church dressing room for not laughing at some bully’s joke, but he remains impassive.  He sings in a church choir, even though we know there is something iniquitous about him (he did, after all, rise up out of a body of water; if nothing else, he’s offbeat).  The six victims all wear masks of civility (some more thinly than others) which are peeled away by their deaths (not that their true selves are revealed prior to their demises since we’ve already seen their true selves in their individual introductions [all the more to condemn them], but their true selves are the reason why they are being murdered in the first place, thus their final reposes are the truth of them).  The Redeemer is most emblematic of this idea.  Each of the murder set pieces is different and inventive, and the character appears differently in each one.  One time he’s in a grim reaper outfit, complete with scythe.  One time he’s wearing some of the worst fake hair (head and facial) in the history of cinema (barring Monty Python’s Life of Brian).  One time he’s a clown (THE go to costume for guaranteed creepiness).  One time he’s some grey amalgamation of a Droog from A Clockwork Orange and John Barrymore’s Mr. Hyde.  And this all makes a kind of sense, because eventually all of these masks will be stripped, and the killer’s purpose (in as much as one is explained to us at all) will be laid bare (not that you can’t guess any of this within the first five to ten minutes).  Inside and outside the slasher archetypes, no one is who they think they present themselves as publicly (and fail), making who they are “in private” implicitly flagitious.

Make no mistake, The Redeemer is not a particularly well-made film.  The acting is amateurish, first gig sort of fare, burdened by some heinous dialogue.  The cinematography is passable at best, with a lot of blown out sunlight in shots (which may or may not appeal to you as an element of the film or as simply inexperienced photography).  The story is silly, with holes through which you could drive a Mack truck.  The supernatural facet feels tacked on in order to get some box office from fans of The Omen.  But the murders are well-orchestrated, and the special effects are decent enough.  The pacing never sags too much, and even though it’s all witless, it does have a certain set of charms.  You just have to be of a mind to enjoy them.

MVT:  The Redeemer and his costumes are the primary reason why all of this is watchable.  Had this aspect been more stagnant, the film would have been a total slog.

Make or Break:  The scene in the auditorium where the Redeemer finally reveals himself (or his persona) to his victims before dispatching another one is visually imaginative.  And the life-size marionette doesn’t hurt any, either.

Score:  6.25/10

Felidae (1995)

**POSSIBLE SPOILERS**

Francis (Ulrich Tukur) is a cat whose owner (the cats in the film refer to humans as “can openers”) Gustav (Manfred Steffen) has just moved to a new neighborhood.  Discovering a dead cat in his backyard, Francis joins up with local curmudgeon Blaubart (Mario Adorf) to unveil the killer and expose the truth behind it all.

Martin Schaack’s Felidae is an animated film (in case the fact that its main characters are felines didn’t tip you off, though I guess this could also have been something along the lines of Look Who’s Talking Now) based on a series of novels by Akif Pirincci (I surmise this film is adapted from the first book), and without giving too much away, I’m rather surprised it hasn’t been seen by more people or been talked about more than it has.  This film could easily stand shoulder to shoulder with the dynamic duo of mature-themed cartoons, Watership Down and The Plague Dogs (or frankly any others you would care to name).  If you’re a parent, I’m not sure this is something you should show the kids just yet, however (though I’m positive there are folks who threw it on for the kids assuming all cartoons are kiddie fare, and besides, if you’re reading this, I’m going to also assume you’re the sort who knows a bit about what you and your family watch before you watch it).  There is graphic violence, including beheadings and disembowelings.  There are cats having sex.  There are (perhaps the most disturbing element) scenes of live cats being brutally experimented on by Professor Preterius (the name a clear [and fitting] callback to The Bride of Frankenstein and portrayed here by Gerhard Garbers).  So, if these are things you’re uncomfortable watching, you will want to pick something else for family movie night (or your own personal viewing, for that matter). 

Nevertheless, the adult components of the film are essential to the story, and I think had the choice been made to not depict these things in this manner, it would have done a disservice to the film’s themes.  Naturally, when you pair felines up with murder, the first thought in most people’s heads is “curiosity killed the cat,” and that certainly holds true in Felidae.  Francis is an innately inquisitive character, and he knows a thing or two about what makes cats (and people) tick.  This is summed up nicely in the opening moments when Francis comments that Gustav is a student of archaeology who makes his money writing trashy novels and moves frequently when the creative well runs dry.  But Francis knows this is little more than an excuse Gustav gives rather than dealing with his problems head on.  Francis also detects odors coming from upstairs that immediately set him on edge, but we also know there is no way he will resist the temptation to explore further, as with the killings.  This self-awareness is depicted and foreshadowed in Francis’ dreams.  In the first one, Francis is attracted to a door filled with pure white light (read: truth).  But inside the door, he encounters a faceless doctor (guess who?) who gifts him with a diamond-studded collar that transforms into a choking shackle and set of chains that drag him down to Hell.     

More alarming (yet equally in line with the above, and you can thank me later for not using the term “shocking”), is our introduction to the cult of Claudandus (a fabled cat martyr/god; the name being Latin for “he who must be concealed, locked away”), whom we are introduced to during one of their meetings.  The flock, lead by Joker (Ulrich Wildgruber), fling themselves into an apparatus which violently electrocutes them.  Whether they are killed or just stunned by this action, I’m not fully sure, because killing one’s congregation is not a great way to keep it, but the cats who go through this masochism are not shown moving (or breathing) afterward.  We know that when a religious leader is shown spewing fire and brimstone in a film, he/she is typically either crazy, false, or both.  The cats that are in the cult are curious about Claudandus, about religion, and this will get them knowingly hurt and very likely unknowingly killed.  The religious facet ties into the entirety of the film, not simply as a group of misguided cats being manipulated by forces higher up, but as the embodiment of the power of ideology/theology itself.  

Sexuality ties in strongly with both of these elements, too.  The whole idea of being in heat, of rutting with whoever is available and in proximity, is important to the film’s plot.  The cats being killed have not been neutered.  On the one hand, this plays into the idea of curiosity, since these cats cannot help but screw when the first opportunity arises with other cats about which they know nothing.  The very fact they do this places them in danger (for a couple of reasons).  On the other hand, there is the notion of the religious right’s classic condemnation of unchecked sexuality.  Taking out of the equation the idea of what constitutes cat morality (we already know cats have an idea of Hell from Francis’ nightmares) or fidelity, the violation of this theological edict conceivably damns a given cat’s soul.  In Felidae, casual sex can lead to physical and spiritual destruction.

Even if none of my quasi/pseudo-intellectualizing draws you to this movie (and there are other things going on which may; I just don’t want to give away the store, as it were), the film is structured and told in a visually interesting fashion.  Most shots not involving closeups on cats are framed with Dutch angles.  It’s fairly rare to see perpendicular or parallel lines in much of the film’s compositions, and much of the scenery appears twisted in some aspect of another.  Bright lights are also a rarity, lending the movie some verisimilitude and reinforcing its dark underpinnings.  There are also a lot of bird’s eye view perspective shots (an indication of a deity observing and judging the characters as well as a reference to the characteristic of felines to sit up high on furniture/appurtenances looking down on the world around them).  Further, the film has the distinct flavor of a hardboiled detective novel.  A character is presented with a crime and feels compelled to discover the criminals.  Secondary characters appear to both menace the main character and throw him off the trail (most notably the marvelously designed Kong [Wolfgang Hess], who reminded me of the feline version of Chuck Jones’ Marc Antony character).  Others provide clues, the doling out of which places them in immediate danger.  The protagonist alone can follow the convolutions of what’s going on, the only one beside the antagonist who can put the pieces together in the proper order.  And ultimately, this protagonist is the only one who can confront the antagonist with the truth, though the answers will likely bring a bittersweet resolution.  Slightly lighter in tone than the aforementioned anthropomorphized animations, Felidae still packs one hell of a satisfying wallop.

MVT:  The basis for the narrative is intriguing and chilling, and I feel that it strengthens even after the main mystery is solved.  In other words, it’s not a one-trick pony, and it will reward on future viewings. 

Make or Break:  When the Claudandus cult makes its eyebrow-raising entrance, you instantly know there is much more going on in this film than might be expected.  

Score:  7.5/10