The Screengrab : dan o'bannon

Clippy Strikes Back: The Scariest Technology In Cinema History (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

TRON (1982)

Older brothers usually get to be know-it-alls (and, of course, we’re usually right), but my Big Bro credibility took a huge hit in the ‘80s when I told my kid brother in no uncertain terms that he was absolutely, completely wrong in his crazy belief that Roger Ebert once gave this Disney science-fiction oddity a four-star review. But, though it pained me then (and now) to admit, my brother was absolutely right: Ebert raved about Tron, calling it a “dazzling...technological sound-and-light show that is sensational and brainy, stylish, and fun” in its anthropomorphized depiction of the inner workings of computer technology, starring Jeff Bridges as a programmer trapped in a trippy day-glo software universe Jeff “the Dude” Lebowski would surely appreciate. At the time, of course, director Steven Lisberger’s tale of a Master Control Program bent on domination was fairly unique; that and the film’s visual palette were groundbreaking enough to explain why Ebert (and my brother) could forgive the fairly colorless acting and writing...but it was the cool Disneyland theme park attraction and the super-cool video game that finally won me over to the wonders of Tron. Nowadays, of course, it’s the other way around as the Master Control Program that runs Hollywood routinely morphs video games and theme park attractions into run-of-the-mill movies, computers are ubiquitous and CGI long ago lost its new car smell...but, hey, at least good ol’ Roger Ebert still knows how to flummox me with an occasional WTF? 4-star review! (AO)

SHIVERS (1975)

For his first feature, David Cronenberg came up with an idea that so completely sums up the recurring concepts of his early work -- the horror at the body and mutations, the hang-ups about sexual repression and sexual release -- that it's kind of remarkable that he ever revved himself up again to make another. Set mostly inside a high-tech luxury apartment complex outside Montreal, it begins with a scene that suggests an old-school porno film that's gone off its trolley: a burly, bearded old man assaults a young woman in what looks like a Catholic schoolgirl outfit and, after stripping himself to the waist, sets about vivisecting her. It turns out that he's a scientist who has developed a parasite that, once introduced into the human body, frees the host from anything remotely resembling inhibitions. The girl is his test subject, who has been entirely too efficient at spreading the parasite around to various neighbors, so that by the end of the movie, the whole complex has turned into one enormous writhing, drooling, mindless orgy on the move. This concept is especially disturbing to those viewers shallow enough to notice that the casting department has not done its job with an eye towards assembling the ideal orgy of a Skinemax audience's dreams. Don't let anybody tell you that Montreal in the mid-70s was suffering from a shortage of unsightly people. (PN)

DARK STAR (1974)

Made while he and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon were completing their USC film school postgraduate work, John Carpenter’s debut feature Dark Star paid amusing homage to Kubrick’s seminal 2001 in its portrait of machinery gone awry. Aboard a spaceship whose astronauts have been tasked with eliminating unstable stars in order to pave the way for future colonization, the computer motherboard goes straight-up crazy and a rogue bomb goes even crazier, attempting to detonate in the ship’s loading bay despite the crew’s best efforts to prevent such a catastrophe. Unlike 2001 or O’Bannon’s later screenwriting hit Alien (which borrowed liberally from this film’s premise), Carpenter’s maiden directorial outing is played for tongue-in-cheek laughs rather than chills, and rather ramshackle ones at that. Yet despite an upfront lack of seriousness, this space saga’s conception of technology remains decidedly pessimistic, its story’s faulty equipment conveying an underlying fear of the potential calamity that awaits those foolish enough to count on CPUs for their safety. (NS)

COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970)

This sci-fi film can be watched in its entirety on YouTube, and it doesn't lose much there. Directed by the erratic Joseph Sargent, whose other credits include Jaws: The Revenge but also The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and the 1989 TV film Day One (a good docudrama about the ultimate evil technology story, the Manhattan Project), it's not a visually distinguished movie, but its treatment of the ever-popular computers-are-our-masters theme, specifically geared to the nuclear age, is impressively spiky. Dr. Forbin, played by The Young and the Restless mainstay Eric Braeden, has perfected the ultimate missile-defense system, a supercomputer called Colossus that will have absolute control over America's nuclear arsenal and is impervious to attack. As soon as it's switched on, Colossus announces that it senses the existence of its own doppelganger -- Guardian, a Soviet supercomputer with the same function and capabilities. Furthermore, Colossus and Guardian make contact with each other and decide that they should join forces to protect the planet, shutting out the middle man -- i.e., us. Various attempts are made, under Dr. Forbin's direction, to override, penetrate, and otherwise shut down the computers, with results that only raise the question, "What part of 'impervious to attack' do you not understand?" In the end, Colossus, after detonating a couple of missiles just to remind us that it means business, assures the human population that it wants only the best for the world over which it now holds complete control, always a reassuring sentiment whether you hear it from a supercomputer with nuclear capability or Billy Mays. (PN)

Click Here For Part One, Two & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager

The Letdowns: Lifeforce (1985)

Nick Schager — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

In this recurring column, we revisit (and reconsider) eagerly anticipated films that didn’t seem to fulfill their pre-release promise.

Though dogged by rumors that executive producer Steven Spielberg spearheaded its production, 1982’s Poltergeist was nonetheless The Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper’s first mainstream, major-studio success. His 1985 follow-up Lifeforce, however, demolished most of the professional momentum generated by his prior effort, and a simple recap of its plot suggests why. Investigating Haley’s Comet, a joint American-British space shuttle crew discovers an extraterrestrial ship full of desiccated bat-man creatures and three nude humanoids trapped in giant crystals, whom the astronauts bring aboard their own craft. Some time later, another space expedition recovers these three unclothed figures, including a gorgeous female (Mathilda May), and transports them to Earth, where they turn out to be space vampires who can possess bodies and are intent on draining – and then beaming to the umbrella-shaped ship they’ve positioned just above London – as many human souls as they can harvest. As May’s sexy E.T. sucks people dry and telepathically communicates with the astronaut (Steve Railsback) who first discovered her, Londoners sapped of their lifeforces become zombies, terrorizing the city and putting mankind’s continued survival in peril.

The term “batshit insane,” it seems, was created with this specific film in mind. And yet I’d argue that’s a positive, since how many unironic psychosexual space vampire-zombie apocalypse films do you get in one lifetime – and helmed by Tobe Hooper in his (relative) prime, no less? Adapted from Colin Wilson’s novel Space Vampires by Don Jakoby and Alien scribe Dan O’Bannon, Lifeforce has an off-the-deep-end mentality that was bound to alienate, its plot going from silly to ludicrous to mental ward-bonkers without even an accompanying hint of wink-wink self-consciousness. Hooper plays his bizarro material straight, which in this case involves repeatedly employing a dreamy, hallucinatory aesthetic marked by twisting, gliding, seemingly weightless camerawork, extreme soft-focus lighting, and heightened shot-reverse shot angles for his protagonists’ telepathic conversations. Juxtaposed rotating close-ups of May and Railsback during their maiden encounter not only beautifully evoke how Railsback’s world is about to be turned figuratively upside-down, but elegantly establishes the two characters’ forthcoming mental-physical union, one of many instances where Hooper’s evocative direction elevates his often loony-tunes sci-fi saga.

Hooper’s potent widescreen cinematography and Henry Mancini’s robust score help foster a surrealistic atmosphere for a story simultaneously intoxicated and frightened by femininity. The embodiment of male sexual fantasies and anxieties, May’s Playboy-ready, perpetually nude succubus gives the action a perversely electric energy, while the performances of Railsback, Peter Firth (as a military colonel) and Frank Finlay (as a government scientist who studies “death”) afford just enough campiness to keep the proceedings light. Originally trimmed of 15 minutes by TriStar Pictures, Lifeforce’s restored 116-minute DVD cut boasts few glaring plot holes but a number of memorable horror images – blue lightening flashing around the gaping mouths of a reanimated, dried-out corpse and his victim; May’s alien materializing from the blood spewing out of a deceased Patrick Stewart’s mouth; an ominously carnal dream sequence; and a final, naked make-out session between May and Railsback in a column of blue light comprised of human souls. Frequently outlandish and far from profound, it’s nonetheless a box-office bomb that, like its horror-maestro director, deserved quite a bit better.

Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

This may be the scariest Halloween in recent memory.

Whatever happens in the election, it's going to be a nightmare for tens of millions of Americans. But until then, we’ve got a few days to dress like Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin, drink pumpkin-flavored beer and relax with ghosts, vampires and zombies instead of all those scary talking heads on TV.

There was some debate here in the Screengrab Crypt regarding whether this was a list of the BEST horror films of all time or the SCARIEST (or if there’s a difference)...which naturally got us thinking about just what makes a film scary in the first place.

When my mother-in-law was a wee little French-Canadian, she went to a screening of Murders in the Rue Morgue where a theater employee in a gorilla suit popped out when the lights came up, sending the audience screaming into the streets of Nashua, New Hampshire...now THAT’S scary.

On the other hand, there are some horror movies that skip the gotcha! moments in favor of sheer dread, a creeping mood of hopeless, helpless paranoia that haunts your nights long after the adrenalin rush from the guy in the gorilla suit has faded. I remember squirming my way through all the maggots and vomited intestines of Lucio Fulci’s Gates of Hell as a teenager, but what scared me the most was the Italian film’s pervasive sense of inescapable doom...

...not that I have especially fond memories of the film. Just because it scared me didn’t mean I liked it, in the same way I’d rather read a 700-page grad school dissertation on the cultural significance of the torture porn craze than sit through Saw V.

Like comedy, it’s hard to nail down the secret of great horror, but we know it when it lurches up...RIGHT BEHIND YOU!!!!!

Just kidding. Enjoy the list, and Happy Halloween from your pals here at The Screengrab!

25. RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985)

What is it with zombies? Why do we love them so? We’ve got at least a half dozen killer corpse movies on this list...but personally, I’ve always had a special place in my braaaaiiiiiinnnssss for Dan O’Bannon’s punk-rock tribute to the genre, starring the venerable, indispensable B-movie staple Clu Gulager as the boss of two medical warehouse employees who accidentally unleash a zombie apocalypse. According to the film’s clever, way-better-than-it-has-to-be script (also by O’Bannon), Night of the Living Dead was a true story, but the government covered the whole thing up...and they would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for a mishap involving a missing barrel of deadly zombie toxin and the aforementioned bumbling warehouse employees: Freddy (whose friends are rockin’ out to the Damned and the Flesh Eaters -- and, for some reason, getting naked -- in a nearby graveyard) and Frank, whose eventual fate is actually kinda touching thanks to a horror movie hall-of-fame performance by character actor James Karen. One of my all-time favorites in the “disappearing characters” genre, Return is frightening, funny and exciting by turns, and pioneered “fast zombie” technology long before Danny Boyle hogged all the credit in 28 Days Later. Plus, the soundtrack totally kicks ass...and, of course, BRAAAAIIIINNNSSSS!!!!!

24. THE INNOCENTS (1961)

One of the most effective ghost story movies ever made is also perhaps the finest of all the attempts to adapt Henry James to the screen. (John Mortimer and a pre-In Cold Blood Truman Capote worked on the screenplay, which is based on a theatrical adaptation of James' The Turn of the Screw.) Deborah Kerr is a fascinating jangle of authoritative command and nervous anxiety as the new governess who thinks she's seen the apparitions of her predecessor and that woman's lover, the valet Quint, who both came to mysterious ends. Ten years later, Michael Winner's The Nightcomers would offer a speculative version of what happened before, with Marlon Brando as Quint. That movie is best remembered as a cautionary tale involving how it came to be distributed in this country: Universal agreed to pick it up as part of a deal to cancel its contract with Brando, who they assumed would never have another hit in his life. Of course, his next picture was The Godfather. Hollywood: it's a scary place.

23. THE STEPFATHER (1987)

A wholly unexpected high point for the slash/fill-in-the-blank-from-Hell genre, with an original script by the matchless crime novelist Donald Newlove which achieves just the right balance of wit and nastiness. Terry O'Quinn makes anonymity terrifying as the title character, a serial murderer of the type known as a "family annihilator" -- unable to deal with cracks in his fantasy ideal of a perfect family, he keeps wiping out one domestic unit and moving on to another. The movie was inspired by Newlove's meditating on the case of the infamously colorless John List, who butchered his family in 1971, and who was still unapprehended when the movie came out; he was arrested in 1989, after being the subject of an episode of America's Most Wanted, and died in prison last March. A TV movie about List was made in 1993. He was played by Robert Blake.

22. NEAR DARK (1987)

Kathryn Biglow's artspolitation movie about a "family" of white trash vampires traveling the back roads in a van with the windows blacked out has an unusually potent mix of striking visual beauty and cutthroat action. Bill Paxton and Lance Henrikson have never looked closer to shitkicker heaven than in the movie's bloody set piece in a roadhouse; the wonderful, and much-missed Jenny Wright is hard to resist as the teen-sister figure, who winsomely infects the country-boy hero (Adrian Pasdar) with vampirism so that she'll have someone nice to talk to between massacres. And where have you gone, Jenette Goldstein? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

21. THE MUMMY (1932)

The legendary cinematographer Karl Freund, whose credits ranged from Metropolis and The Last Laugh to 149 episodes of I Love Lucy, worked as a director of English-language films for only three years in the early-to-mid '30s. This was his Hollywood directorial debut; the last film he directed was the 1935 horror movie Mad Love, and that title would have been a neat fit for this one, too. It stars Boris Karloff as a 3,000-year-old Egyptian who was entombed alive for trying to restore his dead beloved to life; resurrected, he gets right back on the case, having identified the heroine, Zita Johann, as the woman's reincarnation. Slow and dreamily poetic, this is very different from later mummy movies -- Karloff is unbandaged for most of the picture -- and also very different from most of the other classic Universal monster movies. It's the rare film about eternal love than makes you appreciate the fact that most loves have a natural shelf life.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: The Zombie Andrew Osborne, Kill Nugent

Andrew Stanton's Retro-Futurism

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Tasha Robinson at the AV Club brings us a brief but very engaging interview with Andrew Stanton, longtime studio pro at Pixar and the director of WALL-E. In a wide-ranging discussion, he talks about the lunch meeting that produced a decade of the best animated films in history, the development of Pixar from a handful of like-minded creatives to a massive Hollywood studio employing hundreds of people, and his unconventional approach to writing a script in which the main character has no voice. "I remember reading the script for Alien," he recalls; "It was written by Dan O'Bannon, and he had this amazing format where he didn't use a regular paragraph of description. He would do little four-by-eight word descriptions and then sort of left-justify it and make it about four lines each, little blocks, so it almost looked like haikus. It would create this rhythm in the readers where you would appreciate these silent visual moments as much as you would the dialogue on the page. It really set you into the rhythm and mindset of what it would be like to watch the finished film. I was really inspired by that, so I used that format for WALL-E."

One of the fascinating things about the interview is the discussion of how the most high-tech movie studio in history uses some positively primitive methods to actually make their movies. Starting with the standard lament that computers will always take up all the time you allocate them to solve a problem ("Once you've got more memory, you just want to do more with it. And you end up feeling it takes just as long to do now the 16 things in five minutes instead of the one thing you used to do in five minutes"), Stanton notes that Pixar always views its films as storytelling challenges, not technical ones (how do you make a cool movie about monsters, as opposed to how do you solve the fur problem in CGI). He also notes that, with WALL-E, they were attempting to tell a story almost entirely visually, and so looked back -- way back -- for cues: forsaking Chuck Jones' Warner Brothers cartoons as overly familiar to geeks like themselves, they instead prepared for each day's work by watching a Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd silent short every day at lunch for a year and a half.

By the way, I can't be the only one who thinks of Wally Gator when this film is discussed, can I? I can? Okay, never mind.