Dog-Eared but Still Fresh

Dog Soldiers dir. Neil Marshall

Mea muy culpa!  Fourteen or so years ago when Dog Soldiers came out, I just wasn’t that into horror films.  I had a faint impression of Dog Soldiers as a frightening yet dumb movie I’d want to avoid, and so it had never come back across my radar, until recently, when I’ve heard it referenced here and there in praising tones.  As it was written and directed by Neil Marshall, who also helmed the near-classic The Descent (a film that fulfilled all my aspirations for a horror film, in that I found it thrilling and also truly scarring), and that I’ve been on a horror jag lately, I figured it was time.

Taut, scary, funny, and visually creative, Dog Soldiers blew me away.  A fairly ridiculous premise (though what horror movie premise isn’t ridiculous in some way, right?) is implemented with precision pacing, crackerjack editing, and skillful tone changes that scare, amuse, and impress.  This is a movie that begins with the hoariest of cliches, a copulating couple murdered in the woods by a (mostly) unseen assailant in a splatter of blood and wild-eyed fear, yet manages to make the scene playful, fun, and actually somewhat integral to the at-first unrelated events that follow.

The plot: A squad of unarmed British soldiers are plunked down into the Scottish Highlands on a training mission.  Unbeknownst to them, they’re bait for another military mission that aims to capture a werewolf that’s been haunting these parts; unbeknownst to the higher-ups, there’s more than one werewolf!  Slaughter ensues, but not before we’ve been pulled into the camaraderie of the soldiers and find ourselves rooting for every last bullocky one of them.  Sean Pertwee is particularly entertaining as their tough-as-nails-yet-sensitive sergeant, while Kevin McKidd is magnetic as a corporal rejected by special forces because he refused a command to shoot a dog, but who now gets his chance to commit guilt-free canine mayhem.  And a Corporal Bruce Campbell is a not-so-subtle reference to the playful horror world of Sam Raimi.

The initial appearances of the werewolves are masterful, quick glimpses of amazingly designed half-man, half-wolf creatures that are uncanny and scary.  Even when we get a better view of the creatures, the effect remains powerful, paired as these closer looks are with enormous amounts of blood and gore that, in the world of Dog Soldiers, manages to be both horrifying and playful in one go.  The werewolves are wonderfully implacable, their largely immobile faces nonetheless conveying death-dealing menace.  The plight of the soldiers is hallucinatory, nightmarish; armed only with blank cartridges initially, their situation improves only marginally once they come across a stash of real weaponry, seeing as shooting the werewolves slows them down but doesn’t seem to ever kill them.  They’re not impervious to the cut of a blade, though, and luckily the house the soldiers hole up in for their last stand contains more than its fair share of old swords, axes, and relatively sharp kitchen implements.

Dog Soldiers runs like a well-oiled machine, but it’s organic and human-scaled; there may have been a few CGI effects here and there, but it’s largely old school, and all the more successful for it.  Like the best art, it persuasively creates its own world that we’re happy to inhabit as long as it lets us - that is, as long as the hounds can be kept at bay.

Bond Gone Bad

The Day of the Jackal dir. Fred Zinnemann

Yes, it’s a tad dated in the acting department, but in other ways the long, patient game of The Day of the Jackal is refreshing and exhilarating.  It has the city-shifting rhythm of a Bond film, but geography has a heft you don’t often get in contemporary thrillers - distances and locations matter to the plot, and aren’t just there to create a veneer of international pizazz.  And while his deadly judo chops can seem a little silly, Edward Fox’s Jackal is gripping, chilling, and darkly charismatic - he seems at time like David Bowie’s sinister double, Ziggy Stardust gone to the dark side, trading in his Fender for an Italian-made sniper rifle (complete with customized exploding bullets!).  His assignment might derive from a specific historical moment - defeated French right-wingers seeking vengeance for Charles de Gaulle’s handling of the war in Algeria - but the Jackal also possesses a nihilistic lone wolf quality, pursuing his mission even when its political purposes have disappeared.  The film clearly maintains the Jackal as a figure of fascination: you don’t necessarily want him to succeed in his mission, but every scene reveals new reserves of ingenuity and determination, if not necessarily any deeper insight into his character.  Here, the Bond parallels again feel apparent - this Englishman has a license to kill, uses sex as a weapon, and deploys a lack of conscience to his advantage.

The Jackal’s nemesis, the unassuming police inspector Lebel (Michael Lonsdale), is equally methodical, if far less flashy (I defy any viewer not to have an Inspector Clouseau flashback at least once during Lebel’s time onscreen -- and to bring the James Bond references full circle, Lonsdale played villain Hugo Drax in the Roger Moore-fronted Moonraker).  In a race against time, Lebel relies on deduction, basic policework, and luck to track his man.  He and the Jackal create an essential dialectic for the film; the cleverer the Jackal appears, the more you root for the inspector to rise to the occasion.  This is a film that makes the viewer root for legitimate intelligence work, and argues for its efficacy; it’s a reminder that once upon a time, the surveillance powers of the state were not nearly so broad, or that they at least took a lot more manpower.  Creepier are the depictions of France’s counterintelligence service, which is depicted as engaging in kidnapping, torture, murder, and generally going too far; showing that the government is also capable of evil helps lend the film a certain moral gravity, and elevates it above a simple good police versus evil terrorist narrative.

Oh, Yeah, That's a Thing!

The Thing dir. John Carpenter

The Thing had been drifting onto my radar lately, mainly through hearing an interview with John Carpenter.  I didn’t rush to watch it like I did Assault on Precinct 13 (as good as ever on a second viewing), probably because, while I hadn’t seen it in its entirety before, I had seen a few bits here and there when I was a kid; enough to arouse unpleasant, resistant feelings now.

It’s obvious now where those feelings came from; even watching it as an adult, The Thing is an unsettling trip from its opening frames.  A helicopter pursues a husky that runs through the wastes of Antarctica, a rifleman repeatedly shooting out the door at the dog - a grotesque disparity of technological power and fleshly vulnerability.  It feels like a sadistic game; as the animal nears an American encampment, you wonder if perhaps this is some arcane vendetta being played out by rival researchers who’d warned their neighbors not to let their dog near their property again.  But when the helicopter lands and the man proceeds to keep firing at the canine, even when it means shooting at the camp members, it’s apparent that some measure of derangement is involved - a feeling clinched when the rifleman tosses a grenade at the mutt.

Our efforts to suss out this strange situation are now joined by the site members.  A trip to the Norwegians' camp turns up a bloody scene of carnage and death; no one is left alive to tell the tale of what’s happened.  There’s also a corpse of some kind that doesn’t look quite human, which they bring back to the camp for further examination.  But lest you worry that they’ve brought back some unspeakable evil, fear not - that evil already lurks in their midst, in the form of the dog they think they’ve rescued from the crazy Nordic gunner.

The revelations of the creature in their camp occur in scenes that are variously shocking, nauseating, and all around creep-tastic.  Thirty years on, the special effects are stunningly compelling.  The first unveiling happens as the husky is penned in with four other camp dogs; the other dogs move from initial anger at the intruder in their midst to abject fear, one of the dogs actually trying to eat his way through the mesh of their enclosure rather than be trapped with this. . . thing.  The metamorphosis that unfolds is fleshily eruptive and deeply grotesque.  As the creature emerges out of the dog in a vaguely canine-like form, like an evil parody of biology, there’s a profound sense of violation, almost as if a taboo is being broken.  When tendrils shoot out of its body, choking and absorbing a couple other dogs, you get a sense of a boundaryless entity that is purely predatory.  This essential formlessness of the creature, combined with its amazingly depicted, gross mimicry of its hosts, is the fundamental horror of this film.  This is a movie that successfully runs counter to the idea that the scariest things are those left to the imagination: I’m pretty sure that at least some of what The Thing shows us is worse than anything I could have thought up.  

But setting aside its handful of tour de force freak-us-the-fuck-out scenes, The Thing unspools a tight narrative of suspense and paranoia.  In part, this comes from the clever duality of the creature - it can taken the form of anyone or anything (hello, paranoia!), but when it reveals itself, it can do so with suddenness, and in unexpected forms (hello, suspense!).  In particular, the film’s air of paranoia is so effective because at least some of the base camp members are competent and open-minded, so that when the reality of what they face seems to always stay one step ahead of their conjectures, it’s all the more gripping.  And there are enough characters so that you get a bit of variety in people’s reactions, as well as a realistic sense of group dynamics.  In a similar vein, the film’s suspense works so well because Carpenter gives us time to breathe, and maybe relax a little, at some crucial junctures.  And I think we’re a bit more willing to roll with its incredible premise because it feels so grounded in its Antarctic setting - you get the sense of the cold and unforgiving world all around them, particularly in a couple outdoor scenes (something in particular about their occasionally awkward runs over snow really got me - a small but effectively tangible detail).

Setting aside the grotesquerie of the creature effects, The Thing also a good-looking film.  I particularly enjoyed the nighttime shots of the base camp, eerie blue lights against the blackness, and the icy warrens of the climactic scene, lit with a mellow yellow glow.  I think the more pleasant aesthetics work to set off the disgustingness of the amorphous creature.

In a twist that you can take as either uncanny or meh, my initial viewing of The Thing was disrupted by various defects in the DVD I’d obtained from the library.  It finally gave up the ghost in the midst of the most terrorizing and well-known scene of the movie, in which the creature manifests as a gaping maw and dangles its head on a ceiling-high stalk.  I ended up checking out a functioning DVD the next day and rewatching at least half the film.  Overall, it was a prolonged and intense living within Thingworld that I would not recommend to the faint of heart; even now, I am still pinching myself as a reminder that I’m no longer stuck with Kurt Russell in that icebound base camp. . .