The Screengrab : soylent green

Set Your DVR! December 29, 2008 - January 5, 2009

Hayden Childs — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Ugh. The post-Xmas blues are coming on strong. Hell, let's drink to baby new year 2009 and get it over with! Here's the DVR-worthy scoop for the coming week. Times are Central/Eastern and overnight movies go with the previous day.

Monday, December 29:

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is all wacky postmodernism, while The Sweet Hereafter is quite the opposite. The Player is somewhere in-between, but a lot funnier.

1:30/2:30 pm: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead on IFC.
9/10 pm: The Sweet Hereafter on IFC.
11 pm/12 am: The Player on IFC.
3:05/4:05 am: The Sweet Hereafter on IFC.

Tuesday, December 30:

The penultimate day of 2008 is all about the past and the future! Ang Lee's Ride With The Devil is a topsy-turvy Civil War film, while Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch is not just the greatest Western, but the greatest film that this country has ever produced. CQ is about a lost young screenwriter in swinging Europe during the 60s making a Barbarella-like retro-future flick. Soylent Green is, uh, people. Heaven's Gate is an amazing, dull something.

4:30/5:30 pm: Ride With the Devil on AMC.
7/8 pm: The Wild Bunch on AMC.
7:30/8:30 pm: CQ on IFC.
9/10 pm: Soylent Green on TCM.
1/2 am: Heaven’s Gate on TCM.

Wednesday, December 31:

It's the last day of the year, spend the sober part of it with America's (fictionalized) history. Stagecoach, the film that Orson Welles studied to learn how to direct movies, is surprisingly claustrophobic, given that it was shot in Monument Valley, and one of the most influential films ever made. And of course you've seen the two Sergio Leone movies before, but there's never a bad reason to watch one of the Man With No Name films.

5/6 am: Stagecoach on TCM.
9/10 am: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly on AMC.
1/2 pm: A Fistful of Dollars on AMC.

Thursday, January 1:

If you find yourself up early (or late), The Coen Brother's gangster film Miller's Crossing is the best movie they've made. TCM has a Cary Grant film festival running during the day, with the screwball classics Bringing Up Baby, The Awful Truth, and It Happened One Night (there's others, too, but these are the best). In prime time, TCM is running the original King Kong, which is an awe-inspiring movie. And Reservoir Dogs is, of course, the movie that launched Madonna's career.

8:15/9:15 am: Miller’s Crossing on IFC.
10/11 am: Bringing Up Baby on TCM.
2:30/3:30 pm: Miller’s Crossing on IFC.
3:15/4:15 pm: The Awful Truth on TCM.
5/6 pm: It Happened One Night on TCM.
7/8 pm: King Kong (1933) on TCM.
9:15/10:15 pm: Reservoir Dogs on IFC.
2:35/3:35 am: Reservoir Dogs on IFC.

Friday, January 2:

While IFC has the weirdness of Blue Velvet, TCM is running a Randolph Scott film festival. The first two were directed by Budd Boetticher and are great, sometimes dark, versions of the classic Western style. I don't know anything about The Cariboo Trail. Western Union was directed by Fritz Lang. Excuse me, I mean Fritz "Kick Ass" Lang.

6:25/7:25 pm: Blue Velvet on IFC.
7/8 pm: The Tall T on TCM.
8:30/9:30 pm: Ride Lonesome on TCM.
10/11 pm: The Cariboo Trail on TCM.
11:30 pm/12:30 am: Western Union on TCM.
2:15/3:15 am: Blue Velvet on IFC.

Saturday, January 3:

Saturday doesn't have much. The 47 Ronin is the first part of an epic samurai tale. I'm guessing the second half will run the following Saturday. And Modern Times is the classic Chaplin film.

7/8 am: The 47 Ronin, Part I on IFC.
7/8 pm: Modern Times on TCM.

Sunday, January 4:

Burden of Dreams is the documentary about the ambitious dreamer Werner Herzog slowly going insane while trying to film Fitzcarraldo, a movie about an ambitious dreamer who slowly goes insane. Harlan County, USA is a documentary about a mining strike in Kentucky in the 70s. After watching this movie, you may join the IWW. And Paranoid Park is Gus Van Sant's 2008 film about skateboarders and murder. It's in the vein of his Death Trilogy rather than his more conventional style, and it's topping many Best Of 2008 lists.

7/8 am: Burden of Dreams on IFC.
8:45/9:45 am Harlan County, USA on IFC.
12:05/1:05 pm: Burden of Dreams on IFC.
5:30/6:30 pm: Paranoid Park on IFC.

Monday, January 5:

Back to the grindstone again! In this case, the grindstone will be played by Andrei Tarkovsky's experimental film Solaris and Michael Winterbottom's trippy history of Tony Wilson and the Manchester scene, 24 Hour Party People.

1:35/2:35 pm: Solaris on IFC.
4:30/5:30 pm: 24 Hour Party People on IFC.

Morning Deal Report: Cronenberg Does Ludlum

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:15:00 GMT

Back in the early days of the interwebs, I used to butt heads with a contrarian boob who insisted that Tony Danza was our greatest comic resource and that Robert Ludlum was a modern-day Dickens, among other dubious claims. While Danza remains sadly under-appreciated (although he did appear on a 2005 All My Children episode as Erica Kane’s wedding planner, so there’s that), Ludlum has been the recipient of a posthumous reputation bump thanks to the Bourne movies. Now creepmaster David Cronenberg is getting in on the action, as he negotiates to direct The Matarese Circle, a thriller based on a Ludlum novel. Denzel Washington is attached to star in the movie in which “two rival intelligence agents -- one American, one Soviet -- find themselves working together to ferret out and vanquish members of a mysterious group of criminals called the Matarese that has infiltrated the highest levels of American government,” per The Hollywood Reporter. No word yet on whether or not there’s a part for Tony Danza.

Forest Whitaker’s first leading role 20 years ago was Charlie Parker in Clint Eastwood’s jazz biopic Bird. Now Whitaker takes on another jazz legend as the director and star of What a Wonderful World, the first Louis Armstrong biopic authorized by Satchmo’s estate. Ron Bass will write the script that “will kick off during the musician’s impoverished early years in New Orleans and primarily chronicle his career as a trumpet virtuoso and improvisational singer,” Variety reports.

Its producer compares it to Soylent Green, but it sounds more like Quintet to me: it’s Fortuna, starring Dominic Monaghan and Freddy Rodriguez. “Set in 2100, Fortuna envisions an Earth where a collapsed economy and climate crises have eliminated the middle class, leaving a few very wealthy and the teeming masses in severe poverty. To give hope and avoid revolt, the elite create Fortuna, a mysterious game where one in a thousand wins a big payday and joins the upper classes. But their hidden goal to ‘reduce poverty’ by 30% over 50 years comes with a deadly price tag,” says THR. I dunno – collapsed economy? Climate crisis? Sounds like crazy way-out science fiction to me!

Related:
No, But I've Read the Movie: NAKED LUNCH
Popular Mechanics Makes List of Most Prescient Sci-Fi Flicks

Fitting Farewells: The Top Ten Great Final Films (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

We recently asked YOU what Top Tens you’d like to see here on The Screengrab and, among the many fine suggestions, “Other Matt” proposed the Top Ten Ignominious Exits (i.e., “...films of an actor that are less than glorious and not [fitting] the last time we see them on celluloid”)... a list we’ll actually tackle NEXT week, since THIS week, in honor of Heath Ledger’s final completed performance (as the Joker in The Dark Knight), we've decided to examine the other side of the Two-Face coin: actors and directors who managed to fade to black with a fitting and/or memorable cinematic swan song.

Robert Altman's A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION (2006)

When this project was first announced, it was a real head-scratcher for many: the sensibilities of Robert Altman and Garrison Keillor would seem to blend together about as well as bourbon and buttermilk. While no one in their right mind would ever equate A Prairie Home Companion with one of Altman's masterpieces, the result is a genial slice of faux-Americana that leaves you grinning from ear to ear. The wisp of a plot concerns the closing of the theater that has served as the long-time home of Keillor's homespun radio program, spurring the cast and crew to put on one last show for the folks at home. The specter of death hovers over the proceedings, but Companion is never morbid – how could it be when said specter is embodied by sweet-tempered Virginia Madsen? The backstage shenanigans and onstage farewells lend Companion the highly appropriate aura of a curtain call for a great American master – the icing on one of our culture's richest cakes.

John Wayne in THE SHOOTIST (1976)

After winning his Academy Award for the 1969 Western True Grit, a movie that gave him the chance to make fun of his anachronistic image and his physical decline yet still emerge heroic, John Wayne didn't seem to know what to do with himself. He spent most of the 1970s alternately starring in stale cowboy flicks (Rio Lobo, The Cowboys, Chisum) that tried to deny that he, or the movies, had changed, and embarrassing himself in imitations of the new bullying cop movies that had displaced the Western (McQ, Brannigan), like some combination of Clint Eastwood and a Tyrannosaurus Rex in a bad rug. He rallied, though, for his last film, in which he played a character specially tooled to provide a send-off for Wayne's screen image. He's J.B. Books, a legendary gunfighter who rides in from the plains to take a room in a small town and wait to die of cancer. The movie itself is sentimental and uneven, but Wayne, fitter-looking than in True Grit and dandified with a moustache, performs with more dignity and grace than he'd demonstrated onscreen in years. He must have suspected that this would be his last chance to tone up the tail end of his filmography, and he didn't let himself down. Although Wayne would live another three years, The Shootist was his last film, and 1977 would be the first year in which he didn't appear in a movie since his film debut in 1926.

Edward G. Robinson in SOYLENT GREEN (1973)

Soylent Green is a cheesy camp landmark of a dystopian sci-fi picture, but it has greatness in it, in the form of Edward G. Robinson. Robinson played the ancient researcher who is partner and roommate to Charlton Heston' tough-cop hero. As someone old enough to remember the planet before overpopulation, global warming, and the depletion of its natural resources turned it into a sweltering hellscape, Robinson's character is an emissary from another world, and so was Robinson, who began his career in movies before talkies and became a star in 1931 when he landed the title role in Little Caesar. He and Heston have an old-married-couple rapport that gives the movie its bit of heart; theirs is the only human relationship we see, maybe the last one left in a world that turns people into scavengers and victims. (Heston and Robinson had almost played together in the first of Heston's future shock films, Planet of the Apes, but after playing Dr. Zaius in a test scene, Robinson concluded that he wasn't hale enough to endure wearing the ape makeup for long stretches of time.) To its credit, Soylent Green gives him a beauty of a send-off, gazing wistfully at old nature footage while waiting for his lethal shot to kick in at a euthanasia clinic; it renders the famous "Soylent Green is made from people!" finale an anticlimax. Robinson died in January, 1973, four months before his last picture was released.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s THE SACRIFICE (1986)

Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice is a masterpiece by any yardstick, a beautiful, uncompromising meditation on the encroaching apocalypse and one man’s attempts to stop it in order to protect his family. Yet if one considers that Tarkovsky was suffering from lung cancer -- the disease that eventually claimed his life -- while making the film, it takes on a poignant new layer of significance. Once, in an interview, Tarkovsky stated “the only condition of fighting for the right to create is faith in your own vocation, readiness to serve, and refusal to compromise.” Having built up one of the most acclaimed bodies of work of any filmmaker of his generation, Tarkovsky might have been forgiven for retiring from filmmaking and living out the rest of his days in peace. But Tarkovsky, scarcely 53 years old at the time, wasn’t about to pass away without making one more offering to the gods of cinema. So when the film’s hero (played by Erland Josephson) lays down his life to spare those he loves, it’s impossible not to think of the filmmaker himself, making one final effort to better the art form he loved so passionately and uncompromisingly. Fittingly, The Sacrifice was one of Tarkovsky’s most celebrated films, not only as a tribute to a major work by a master filmmaker, but also as the final film from an artist who had, as always, raged against the dying of the light.

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

Click here for Part Two and Part Three

Unwatchable #89: "Bloodlust!"

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

The exclamation point means extra thrills! At least, I wish it did. Alas, 1961’s Bloodlust! is just another B-movie from the bottom half of a drive-in double feature, even if it does feature one of Robert “Mike Brady” Reed’s earliest leading roles.

I’m not gonna lie to you folks. I’m now a dozen movies into this experiment and it feels like I’ve watched merely five times that many. Only now are the full implications of sitting through 88 more of these crimes against cinema – all of which have been deemed by you, the movie-ranking public, to be even worse than the ones I’ve already seen – beginning to sink in. But I know my calling in life, I have made a vow to you loyal Screengrab readers, and I will see it through even at the cost of my sanity. No, please. I don’t want your pity. I will, however, accept your money. (My book is still available! Makes a great Father’s Day gift!)

Anyway, back to Bloodlust!, which proves to be yet another knockoff of a story most of us read in grade school, The Most Dangerous Game. We have two young couples vacationing together on a yacht piloted by a drunken sea captain. While the cap’n is passed out, Johnny & Betty and Pete & Jeanne decide to hop in the dingy and check out the mysterious island they never noticed before. Hey, let’s have a clambake on the beach! It’s all fun and games until they run into Dr. Albert Balleau (Wilton Graff, a graduate of the BWA-HA-HA-HA!! School of Acting), a kajillionaire who lives on the island with his trembly wife, drunken pal Dean and a staff of grizzled thugs dressed like extras from a Popeye cartoon.

Balleau is a big game hunter, but when one of the couples stumbles onto his trophy room, they discover the horrifying truth: Soylent Green is people! Er, no, wait. The Most Dangerous Game is people! Yes, Balleau has an impressive collection of stuffed humans in a variety of delightful poses. It turns out that the drunken sea cap’n supplied Balleau with escaped convicts for his hunting pleasure. Now Johnny and the gang will become his latest prey.

Bloodlust! is unoriginal, cheaply made and forgettable in every way, but again, I don’t see it as Bottom 100 material. It may not have much going for it, but it does have…quicksand! And really, that’s all I ask. Try harder, people!

Previously on Unwatchable:

90. The Bat People
91. Horrors of Spider Island
92. I Accuse My Parents
93. Howling III: The Marsupials
94. Invasion of the Neptune Men

The Screengrab Presents: The Five Kinds of Twist Endings

Gwynne Watkins — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:15:00 GMT

With M. Night Shyamalan's latest opus on the horizon, our thoughts are drifting to one of the best and worst things ever to happen to movies: the twist ending. True, the twist ending hit oversaturation in the early '00s, when it seemed like every film ended with a tacked-on revelation that all the characters were dead or the same person or characters in a giant videogame or something. But film history is so full of con games, double-crosses and startling last-minute revelations that it would be a shame to lose the twist ending entirely. Here's an affectionate guide to the 5 kinds of surprise endings. And yes, many films fit into more than one category. Call it a twist. -- Gwynne Watkins

#5 The Twilight Zone
In The Twilight Zone, something seems wrong or off-kilter for the entire film, but it's not entirely obvious what that thing is. When the twist is revealed, it creates a shift in perspective that can be easily explained in one sentence (such as the classic Twilight Zone example, "To Serve Man -- it's a cookbook!") Films that do The Twilight Zone well include The Others, Soylent Green and Swimming Pool. But when it's bad, it's very very bad; look no further than The Village, a cautionary tale for screenwriters everywhere.

#4 The Scooby Doo
This is the twist ending that reveals all prior events in the film to be part of an elaborate hoax perpetrated by the characters. And they would have gotten away with it, too! It's most commonly seen in con man movies -- The Game, Matchstick Men, The Sting, The Spanish Prisoner -- although it's cropped up to abysmal effect in "gotcha!" films like Basic and The Life of David Gale.

#3 The Donald Kaufman
Named for Charlie Kaufman's fictional screenwriter brother in Adaptation, The Donald Kaufman is the big twist that ostensibly explains everything, but in fact, makes no sense whatsoever. The Donald Kaufman most often takes the form of "They're both the same person!" or "It was all a dream!" Identity, High Tension and Femme Fatale are recent examples.

#2 The Awful Truth
The Awful Truth is the sucker punch of twist endings: a revelation that turns the main character into a tragic figure. Think Luke Skywalker screaming "That's not true! That's impossible!" in Empire Strikes Back, or the final shot of Rosebud in Citizen Kane. At best, it's dramatically satisfying (see Donnie Darko, Memento or Seven); at worst, it makes you want to slap the filmmaker for being a total sadist (see The Mist).

#1 The 20/20 Hindsight
The hardest kind of twist ending to pull off successfully, The 20/20 Hindsight requires the viewer to sit through an entire movie without realizing that a twist ending is coming. Then, after what seems like the film's resolution, the rug gets pulled out from under them. The Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects are the classic examples; both have a fake-out ending that's quite satisfying, then a last-minute revolution that turns the whole film on its ear. Others include Fight Club, Planet of the Apes and Saw.

Digging Dirt on Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life”

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Not much is known about Tree of Life, the latest from secretive director Terrence Malick (Badlands, The New World), which I guess has something to do with the fact that he’s a secretive director. We know the film stars Sean Penn and Brad Pitt, who replaced the originally cast Heath Ledger (fortuitous turn of events there). We know, thanks to this casting call, that Tree of Life Needs Babies (which sounds almost as ominous as “Soylent Green is people”). And we know that the film is now shooting in the Austin area. In fact, as fortune would have it, it’s being shot a few blocks from the home of Austin American-Statesman columnist Michael Corcoran in Smithville, Texas, and thus Corky has been able to unearth a detail or two.

First of all, it appears that “Smithville is standing in for 1950s Waco, where Malick grew up. We know this because the film has asked the Waco Tribune to make some mock 1950s front pages. Could this be Malick’s first personal memoir film?” If so, it would come as something of a relief, since the title Tree of Life is conjuring up bad flashbacks to The Fountain for me.

Secondly, “Brad Pitt plays the father and Jessica Chastain is the mother of three boys, ages 7- 12. One scene filmed Tuesday was at a barbecue pit on Lee Street and one witness told me that Pitt was driving three boys in a vintage 1950’s car. The day before filming started, the three kids were hanging out at the house on Burleson Street where the title tree is planted.”

And…that’s about it, aside from the photo Corcoran snapped, which may or may not depict the titular tree. Oh, and then there’s this tidbit: “Another publication printed the rumor that someone had been defecating on the front porch of the film house. Not true, says the chief of police. The house is under surveillance around the clock, lest some Brad Pitt fan want something he touched.”

Stay tuned for further developments.

Charlton Heston (1924-2008)

Paul Clark — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 06:39:00 GMT

Charlton Heston, one of only a handful of honest-to-goodness stars remaining from Hollywood's Golden Age, has passed away at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 84 years old. He is survived by Lydia, his wife of 64 years, and his two children and three grandchildren. Details about Heston's death are still sketchy at this point, but he had suffered from symptoms similar to Alzheimer's Disease for years.

Heston began his acting career on the stage, with his first movie role coming from a filmed theatre performance of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, recorded when Heston was all of 17. But the film that brought him into the public eye was Cecil B. DeMille's Oscar-winner The Greatest Show on Earth, in which he played Ben Braden, the manager of the circus and held his own opposite James Stewart and Betty Hutton, among others. In the next few years, Heston split his time between film and television, one of the few actors who managed to work steadily in both media.

However, his stardom skyrocketed when DeMille came calling again, casting Heston as Moses in his final film, 1956's The Ten Commandments. The role required a truly commanding presence, not just to be convincing as the man who led the Israelites out of Egypt, but also to hold his own against the then-awe inspiring special effects, but Heston pulled it off. From there Heston specialized in similarly larger-than-life heroes, often in period adventures such as The Big Country, El Cid, and Ben-Hur, for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor.

In the 1960s, Heston's stardom continued even as his career choices became more inconsistent- for every Major Dundee, there was a The Agony and the Ecstasy in which he was severely miscast in the role of Michelangelo (yes, that one). But he once again found his groove at the end of the decade with Planet of the Apes, now considered a science fiction classic. It was the first in a series of futuristic dramas for Heston, who went on to appear in the film's sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, before starring in The Omega Man and Soylent Green.

During the 1970s, even as young filmmakers and new actors were gaining clout in Hollywood, Heston stuck to his guns and continued playing the sorts of heroes that made him a star. His presence was right at home in square blockbusters like Earthquake and Airport '75, as well as 1976's bloated war epic Midway. Shortly thereafter, Heston began to turn again to television, starring in a number of TV movies, as well as making a guest appearance on Dynasty as Jason Colby, who was later given his own series, The Colbys.

In the 1990s, Heston's leading-man opportunities had mostly dried up, and after that he worked regularly as a dependable character actor, lending an old-Hollywood authority to films like Tombstone, In the Mouth of Madness, and Any Given Sunday, as well as putting in a cameo in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes remake. In addition, he also did a good amount of voiceover work, his commanding baritone gracing films as diverse as Armageddon and Disney's Hercules. He also showed a surprising ability to kid his square-jawed image. After two hosting stints on Saturday Night Live, he had arguably the best scene in the otherwise disposable Wayne's World 2, playing "The Better Actor." He also appeared in True Lies as Arnold Schwarzenegger's CIA boss, a role that allowed him to pass the torch to Arnold as Hollywood's biggest right-leaning star.

In recent years, Heston's politics have increasingly overshadowed his acting. Heston, a longtime supporter of the National Rifle Association, served as its president in 1998, a position he served in until his diagnosis with Alzheimer's. But rather than remembering Heston for his politics- or his final major big-screen appearance in Michael Moore's Bowing For Columbine- I prefer to remember the good times. Of his storied career, I treasure most two performances he gave nearly two decades apart.

The first, of course, is Touch of Evil. Hollywood legend has it that Orson Welles was only supposed to act in the film, and that Heston (who had only taken the role to be directed by Welles) was largely responsible for Welles directing the film. At first glance, Heston's brand of straightforward heroism seems at odds with Welles' morally twisty vision. However, Heston is exactly what the film needs, an uncomplicated but compelling protagonist to contrast with the rest of the proceedings, in particular Welles' corrupt, seedy Hank Quinlan. It all works perfectly, and Heston deserves much of the credit for this, despite the fact that he may just have made film history's least convincing Mexican.

At the other end of his career, in the middle of his elder-statesman period, Heston gave what may have been his best performance in Kenneth Branagh's epic production of Hamlet. Ever since his early work, Branagh has had a love for stunt casting, often to disastrous ends. But Heston's performance is no stunt. In the small but important role of The Player King, he shows a real aptitude for Shakespeare's language, as well as a sensitivity to the nuances of the material. The first time I saw his performance, I couldn't help but think that I'd underestimated Heston all these years. More than just a presence, Heston was an actor, and one who will be greatly missed.

Popular Mechanics Makes List of Most Prescient Sci-Fi Flicks, Screengrab Impressed

John Constantine — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 21:35:00 GMT

Continuing with the suitably meta trend of the past couple of days, here’s another “Top” list posted on a website that loves doing “Top” lists itself. While part one of Entertainment Weekly’s Top 50 Most Vile Villains list was a little hit or miss, Popular Mechanics’ list is an incredibly entertaining read top to bottom thanks to its novel premise. The list also happens to be absolutely terrifying. The majority of these films depict bleak, forbidding, soulless futures for mankind and writer Erik Sofge deftly points out how it’s all coming true. Except for Soylent Green. Soylent Green is still not people.

Check out the list here.

Thanks to Cinematical for the spot and thanks to Erik Sofge for writing about Short Circuit. You can never have enough writing about Gutenberg flicks.

Conglomerated Baddies: The 22 Most Evil Corporations in Movie History, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 21:00:00 GMT

So everybody’s all a-twitter about the new Clooney flick Michael Clayton and how realistic and original it is. "Realistic" is a relative term, sure, but we’d like to note humbly that Clayton fits into a long line of movies about characters crusading against Evil Movie Corporations, some real, many fictional. The fact is, the Faceless Corporation is one of cinema’s easiest targets — cooking the books, offing all detractors, bribing officials, and usually killing its consumers. But maybe it’s about time we paid tribute to these parasitic, conglomerated baddies. They may not sneer like Lee Marvin, and they may not cackle like Gert Frobe, but without them, the annals of movie villainy would be a far more impoverished place. So here they are, The 22 Most Evil Corporations in Movie History.

The Soylent Corporation, SOYLENT GREEN (1973)

Charlton Heston went through some shit in the late 1960s and 1970s. He had to deal with earthquakes, runaway airplanes, post-apocalyptic albinos, and a planet full of damned dirty apes. He didn't always make it to the end of the movie in one piece, but give or take a hissy fit in front of the ruins of the Statue of Liberty, he usually managed to hang onto his stoic composure. The one time he cracked and had to be carried offstage screaming and frothing at the mouth, it came from a good look at the inner workings of the Soylent Corporation. In 2022, the teeming refuge of an overpopulated and underresourced planet depend on SoyCorp for their meager diet: synthetic crackers and buns that go by the names Soylent Red, Soylent Yellow, and the ever-popular Soylent Green, which is said to be made from plankton and which has a tangy zest with just a hint of Edward G. Robinson. For the benefit of extremely slow viewers, the terrible secret of Soylent Green is spelled out in Chuck's exit line, which has entered the camp lexicon and is beloved even, or maybe especially, by those who've never seen the movie.

The Parallax Corporation, THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974)

In Taxi Driver, arguably the greatest of all the seventies assassination movies, Travis Bickle, like Lee Harvey Oswald and Arthur Bremer before him, plans to kill one target and then shifts to another when things don't work out. What Travis lacks is a stabilizing figure to help him stay focused and channel his energies — just what the Parallax Corporation offers to the maladjusted social reject searching for the right career path. In this paranoid fantasy, both the "lone gunmen" accused of picking off the potential saviors of our nation, and the real assassins for whose crimes those patsies are framed, are the carefully sculpted products of a company that arranges the hits and shapes the way they're perceived by a gullible public. They're so good at it that reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty), the movie's hero, whom we expect to expose the conspiracy, instead winds up as the latest patsy. In the movie's most memorable sequence, Beatty and the audience are subjected to a lengthy film montage that's a regular part of the Parallax training process, a scene apparently based on the not-implausible notion that watching short student films could turn someone homicidal.

The Weyland-Yutani Corporation, ALIEN Saga

Most of our readership will surely have two thoughts when reading the above byline, the first being, "wait, Alien AGAIN???" and the second being, "Wait, the Company has a name?" Well, yes, they do, although we’d understand if you hadn’t noticed it. In Ridley Scott’s original film, Weyland-Yutani ran the show, but their presence in the film was almost subliminal — on computer monitors, on a beer bottle, and so forth. But as the series continued, their logo became more visible, especially in Aliens, where it appeared at several points emblazoned on the walls of the mostly-deserted colony where the film is set. But the Company’s ubiquity pales in comparison to its insidious presence in the Alien universe. From the time it tricked the Nostromo into embarking on an alternate, crew-expendable mission resulting in the death of all but one crew member, Weyland-Yutani consistently sent people into the path of the Alien, all in the name of bringing back a specimen for weapons research. Ash’s sentiments about the Alien — "a perfect organism. . . unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality" — could just as easily be applied to Weyland-Yutani. But as the saying goes, there’s always a bigger fish. In a scene deleted from Alien: Resurrection, it was announced that Weyland-Yutani had somewhere along the line been bought out by Wal-Mart. Not even a money-grubbing intergalactic juggernaut stood a chance against the Sam Walton empire.

Pacific Gas and Electric, ERIN BROCKOVICH (2000)

If you want a generic corporate name, "Pacific Gas and Electric" will do. And if you want a particularly evil-sounding chemical name, what’s better than hexavalent chromium? It’s got HEX in it and it sounds shiny. . . like the Terminator. And then if you really wanna rile people up, have the faceless corporation dump evil chemicals into something harmless and life-sustaining. . . like groundwater. Watch as PG & E (Profits! Greed! Eeeevil!) seems to snicker while the good townspeople get sicker and sicker from an act so innocent — simply drinking the water. If you made it up, they’d slap cliché (or Ibsen) on the script coverage. But if it happened to be a True Story with a 333 million dollar settlement at the end of a class-action lawsuit, then you’d have an Oscar-winning hit movie.

"The Company", SECONDS (1966)

John Frankenheimer's profoundly depressing horror movie deals with the machinations of a deep-pocketed organization that arranges for people unhappy with their lives — from the looks of things here, that would be everybody over the age of fourteen — to be "reborn" via plastic surgery and forged identities. Veteran character actor John Randolph plays the poor schlub who gets roped in and, because the Company uses entrapment and blackmail to make it "easier" for their clients to give up their old lives, is forced to become Rock Hudson. No one will be surprised to learn that this does not prove to be the automatic gateway to an exciting, more rewarding new existence. Unable to cope, Randolph/Rock finally demands that the Company give him a new new life, and soon discovers how they acquire the corpses they need to fake the deaths of new clients. The tough minded will say he brought it all on himself by not ducking out the nearest fire exit when he learned that the head of the Company was Will Geer, TV's Grandpa Walton. As any hardened moviegoer could have told him, anybody that folksy (see also "Brimley, Wilford" in The Firm) in a position of power has got to be up to no good.

— Paul Clark, Pazit Cahlon, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov, Bryan Whitefield