Sunday, October 15, 2023

Those Times Michael Crichton Got Horny: A Brief Account of 90s Erotic Thrillers and Experiments in Early AI


Let's talk about porn. Not the "Know it when I see it" kind - the verboten kind, but the softcore - the type for which Cinemax and Showtime were initially founded. There's something inherently funny about that period in the 80s and 90s when they tried to make it more palatable to the general public. Comedian Dave Anthony often jokingly reflects on the 70s, when hardcore was first popularized and you'd attend a screening of Behind The Green Door with people from your community, like your dentist. By the time I was a theatregoer, though, they ran those in different theatres and scrambled cable channels
. Before even dial-up was a time when curiosity and confusion were your only motivation. Then one day, you'd find the dilapidated, sunburnt pages of a Playboy or Penthouse from six months back in the desert and that'd be your first exposure.  

The softcore kind, however, was booming— packing in audiences of parents at the nearest multiplex right next door to screenings of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. For most 90s children, the erotic thrillers popular in their heyday are films we're only catching up with now - save for a few precious minutes we snuck channel surfing. Folks, perhaps it's only the basic cinematic competence of films from that time, but so far we've all been far more impressed with them than our parents. 

Rising Sun was one of the first such films that I stumbled upon cable one day, with a particularly graphic opening 20 minutes.  No child could possibly care about a corporate murder mystery with bizarre racial overtones, but Rising Sun had the ultimate kid cheatcode: Michael Crichton. By 1994, a year after I'd seen Jurassic Park in theatres no less than eight times, the author's name was associated only with Velociraptors and Dilophosaurs. A few years later, we'd gladly pack in for Congo, another Crichton adaptation that dealt with an extinct species, and were treated to two hours of a man in a gorilla suit doing sign language (it's a film for which I still have great affection, nevertheless). Crichton's name was everywhere in the press, and with it came promises of more Mezozoic carnage. 


There were no dinosaurs in Rising Sun, but Crichton's name got us curious. Couple that with a maturing young boy's curiosity about the female body and a crippling lack of sex education, you get something as potentially lethal as a prehistoric lizard.  And the non-dinosaur Crichton films kept coming. Rising Sun and Disclosure, his erotic thrillers adapted by Phillip Kaufmann and Barry Sonnenfeld, respectively, couldn't be more hyper focused on the issues of the decade: sexual harassment, incensed racist paranoia and corporate mergers. 

Rising Sun opens on, well, just that, and it's meant as a portend. Like the submarine under the San Diego pier in Spielberg's doomed 1941, The Japanese Are Coming. Anti-Japanese sentiment may have started right after Pearl Harbour, but it lingered and burrowed, and fears of a new economic invasion were not real, but widely reported. The end of the Cold War and the start of Japan's economic growth in the 1970s suddenly meant that it was viewed as legitimate competition. Myths about great Japanese business strategy and tradition had spread like a game of broken telephone (some true, some hilariously false), and you can still find supposed great business hysterically misusing Sun Tzu's The Art of War (later starring Wesley Snipes, and Tzu was Chinese, but, hey). 

The underlying assumption is, of course, that they're going to take our women. So when a call girl winds up dead at the LA corporate office of the Nakatomo corporation, a black detective (Snipes) and a retired liaison (Sean Connery) between Japanese and American affairs is tasked to investigate. The company's early work in AI creates some very 90s novelty that complicates the case, and gives Sean Connery Wesley Snipes' head at one point. 


The whole thing is very funny and would be much more openly laughable were it not for Connery's icy cool performance, and the lack of any real murder mystery leaves to film free to let the two of them riff. They have chemistry, undeniably, and it's about the only aspect of the film that keeps it running. 

As uncomfortable and bizarre is as Rising Sun about its racism, the book is reportedly much worse, with Crichton even outing the killer as an enemy invader. Kaufmann, perhaps more sober-minded and well-meaning, is disinterested. The killer is revealed - it's the smug corporate American - but he's killed offscreen, last seen being entombed in the very cement on which the new Japanese headquarters will be.  It's not particularly great filmmaking, but what it does offer is a glimpse into damage control - as if Kaufmann were a moderator at a debate who must cope with an inflammatory conservative. If Rising Sun makes anything very apparent, it's that Michael Crichton was an author with issues; issues that would develop into him naming a child molestor character in a book after a climate change scientist with whom he took umbrage. (It's also a good time to note that some of the research was inspired by Toronto critic Jesse Hawken's excellent podcast on the film, ep. 123 of Junk Filter). 

Disclosure's worse, whose answer to the great mystery of sex politics of the 90s is that the woman gets to slap the guy on the ass, too. Michael Douglas is the smuggest of corporate yuppies, the kind who says things like, "Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy" about someone's misfortune. Crichton and Sonnenfeld were lucky to have had Douglas, who so perfectly filled those Gordon Gekko shoes for the avarice-loving. He's the best thing about Disclosure, the cockiest son of a bitch in the room. 

That confidence is shaken when Demi Moore, a former flame, shows up and forces oral sex on him. The scene is graphic, absurd, and hysterical in ways that belong specifically to the early 90s. At once slapstick and intentionally shocking, Moore's enthusiastic. Douglas, fresh off Basic Instinct, is no slouch, the whole thing is just disgusting sensationalism.  It's no help that Disclosure also features the worst of all 90s men: Dennis Miller.  

Of course, Moore has ulterior motives related to corporate intrigue - and I use that word incredibly loosely. There's nothing intriguing about Disclosure's VR, it's aged as well as Brett Leonard's The Lawnmower Man, replete with a control command from Douglas: Doit. 

Do it. Do the sex with the millionaire. Do the client who is clearly wrapping you around her finger. Do the real estate deal that puts Michael Keaton downstairs. Do the corporate merger, as that appears to be all that was at stake in 90s thrillers: a deep-rooted, impersonator-syndrome-inspired terror at the notion that someone, somewhere, was doing it better than you. 



What Women Want (2000)


90s VR and AI, in Rising SunDisclosure and in works like The Lawnmower Man, are used often to expose the deep-seated kinks and urges of the brilliant basement scientists that develop them. Retroactively, it makes Elon Musk's handjob-for-a-horse anecdote funnier. 


Saturday, October 14, 2023

Halloween: Every Corner



Halloween
didn't scare me when I first saw it at 13. I'd already seen Paul McCrane melt into a toxic sludge monster in Robocop when I was four. By 90s standards, surely there was nothing in this old movie that could shock me. It was made in the Seventies, after all, and the blood back then always looked too orange for this cynic. Just not real enough. 

What Halloween did do was fascinate me to no end and - okay - maybe a few of those shots of Michael lurking in the background got under my skin. Maybe I rewatched it the next day to be sure I knew exactly when he'd be around every corner. Maybe it put me a little on edge, but what fascinated me most was how a California-shot film so perfectly encaptured the essence of the season nationwide, for such a meager budget. With a few bags of dead leaves and maybe a bucket of blood, John Carpenter managed to articulate that which had become commonplace to my generation. Like his transmission from the nightmarish future in Prince of Darkness, he was broadcasting outward, pushing like the winds that once blew the brown material and dirt into mini whirlwinds in my high school hallways. It was something Paul Winfield would inflect into his narration of "City Confidential" on the old Arts & Entertainment network and countless episodes of "Dateline". It was innately understood: There's something wrong in the suburbs, something evil and omnipresent. 

It's no accident that my love for the picture only grew as I came to understand its historical place. Coupled with my passion for Oliver Stone's JFK and halfway through Jim Garrison's source material, I was well on my way to youthful obsessions about Watergate (I did set foot aboard Nixon's Air Force One shortly before they flew it out for his funeral). Watergate and its wake left the US in a glum state, the pardoning of the president was less a solution than was Jimmy Carter, whose campaign might best be remembered in Altman's Nashville hyperbole ("Hasn't Christmas always smelled like oranges to you?")  It may sound like a bizarre childhood, but the US '90s was as freewheelin' a period imaginable, with our happy, sexy, sax-playing, Democratic president making the office look cool for the first time again since Kennedy. A nostalgia for the 60s had brewed over. It would last about 5 years. 

Of course, to assume anything about Halloween is inherently political would be ludicrous. The film has about as much an ideology as its ill-fated teens. Instead, it's all in the vibes, the same way crystals were being hawked by sham mystics and self-help gurus up and down the coastline. It's a feeling - totally a feeling. All of Halloween, save for Loomis the straight man, is so carefree.  Annie and Linda are carefree. Even the local cop, Annie's dad, is letting loose. He ignores obvious weed smoke pouring from his daughter's car window and Loomis' legitimate concerns - hey, everyone's entitled to one good scare.  Their parents are otherwise absent save for a brief shot of Laurie's father leaving her with the dangerous chore of dropping the key at the Myers' place. One can easily assume they're headed to a key party thrown by Sigourney Weaver's character in The Ice Storm

It's Donald Pleasance's iconic turn as Loomis that became the heart of the franchise if there was any. The best visual representation of what the franchise truly became is that of the late Moustapha Akkad, killed in a suicide bomb in a hotel lobby in Jordan in 2005, greedily cradling a Michael Myers action figure. Loomis from the outset, though, is a very bad doctor. He makes it very clear that he all but abandoned Michael after only a few years of what appeared to be completely conventional treatment. At the very least, he's a doctor ill-equipped and understaffed. His staff couldn't be bothered, they let Michael wander the grounds and hardly question how he learned to drive a car. Totally careless. 



 

What is not carefree about Halloween is the camerawork, so masterfully controlled and composed. There's not a scene without Michael's presence felt or insinuated by Carpenter's haunting, dreadful keyboard. The suburbs were a place of menace, even without boogeymen like Myers. Beyond the upsetting racial history behind the founding of Levittown, New Jersey, there's a fascistic adherence to order still carried out today by homeowner's associations.  By my time in Tucson, that evil was represented by faux-adobe townhouses that all looked the same, with identical red pebble gardens out front. However, there was another, more tangible monster that came to visit. 


My town's boogeyman was named Charles Schmid and he was long before my time. Mr. Browning, my AP Government teacher, swore he'd come into his parent's shop on University Avenue, sporting his fake mole and boots packed with crushed soda cans to elevate his height.  Years later, my brother and I would find a spread on him in Life Magazine that detailed his crimes. The Pied Piper of Tucson murders is still of such notable scandal that just asking about it on a Facebook Group is only met with hushed, curt sadness and a polite "We don't like to talk about that here". Schmid's murders had apparently made some Tucsonan parents uncomfortable to learn of their teenager's nightly habits. The notion of a shared town trauma so clumsily introduced in David Gordon Green's recent trilogy has roots here. Halloween, though, never required a sequel, despite what box office demanded. Its blunt mic drop end is more than enough, because there's always going to be another, just waiting. 

While I lived there, just two hours North, another boogeyman would emerge. Bryan Patrick Miller, better known as The Zombie Hunter for his cosplay, would be later sentenced to death for the murders of Angela Brosso and Melanie Bernas. 


Both of them were separated by decades and location, both of whose costumes played a crucial role in their M.O. The costume of a killer can be anything, but more often than not, it's a uniform. Michael Myers is that blank, white face upon which we can project anything. It could be something down the street, it could be something in your own home, it could just be the entire damn atmosphere of the country. He's the encroaching evil and cancer we allowed to fester and metastasize, no different from the hordes of the anonymous undead in Romero's film that came before or the First Blood for which veterans would soon bay.  


Saturday, May 6, 2023

Why I Love Piranha


I first read about Piranha in the 1997 edition of Leonard Maltin's film guide. Prior to the internet, 1000-plus page tomes with 8-point font by Maltin and Mick Martin & Marsha Porter were not ideal sources for film criticism, but they did serve as a fairly comprehensive guide of what was possibly gathering dust at video stores in your area code. You could care less about their ratings, and often the "Turkeys" or “BOMBS” looked more appealing. Maltin rated it three stars, which was considerably higher than most B-fare in his catalog. More importantly, he included a cast list before the blurb, including both Kevin McCarthy of Invasion of the Body Snatchers fame and Bradford Dillman, the lead in the third Planet of the Apes film - the one where they travel back to the present (the best!). It was also from Joe Dante, the director of Gremlins and more importantly, Gremlins 2: The New Batch - which featured Maltin getting attacked by the titular creatures. To a 13-year-old me, no further sale was necessary. From that point on, I was determined to see Piranha.

To understand why my quest to see Piranha took on Grail-like proportions in my mind, one must first familiarize themselves with the curt, dismissive way Maltin, Martin & Porter could write off a cool-sounding movie. Maltin had disparaged many films I loved, most notably John Carpenter’s The Thing, but these volumes did provide terrific ledgers of film history. The downside would often be the 50-75 word blurbs provided, which left you starving for so much more than their snobbery.

The other reason finding Piranha felt Grail-like is, like many other out-of-print films over the years, it had become such. Tucson, Arizona was not known for its great film libraries, and out-of-print films that weren’t popular at Blockbuster required a bit of searching.  By the time I found Piranha, over a year had passed. The quest likely could have been shortened, there were easier ways to find out-of-print movies pre-internet, but age and inexperience left me equipped only with a phone and directory. There was no search engine or database online of where to go, and torrenting was still years away, particularly for a file of that size. 

After calling every video store in Tucson, I finally received a "Yep" from a clerk at Director's Chair Video, approximately a 45-minute drive. Carless, my brother and mother surprised me with a rental copy one evening. After messing up trying to dub a copy, I gave up, happy that I'd seen it at least once and more than ready to cite it as "superior to Jaws" at parties. Young cinephiles are prone to that kind of hyperbole, particularly when they reach the age of hip contrarianism where trashing Spielberg is en vogue. 


A year later, though, it was released on DVD - just one among a swath of Tuesday releases at Suncoast and Borders - forever putting an end to long, often frantic quests to find forgotten films that so often peppered my youth.  I think of those journeys fondly as endless drives through the sweltering summers to antique shops where "antique" was applied liberally to include Kenner Star Wars action figures and old VHS. My brother and I would hit those Sunday fairs once a month at my former elementary school for records that rarely cost more than a quarter; curiosity shops with names like Americana that later would be inherited by the owner's ungrateful children and transformed into gaudy electronic music havens. These unappraised troves often contained ties emblazoned with a golden elephant and the words, "Goldwater '64" and rare copies of Re-Animator.  We celebrated the advent of DVD, marveled at the MST3k-esque commentary track on Ghostbusters. DVD included special features for which a film nerd from the past would commit treason, but they could never recapture the unadulterated glee derived from finding something truly precious.  A youthful lack of foresight left me only excited at the prospect, not yet disheartened by the loss of long outings in the desert with my brother that would also be associated with first listenings of Elvis Costello, The Sex Pistols, The White Stripes and Gene Clark. There is much of that era that is forever lost, not the least of which was the affordability of the hunt.  

Piranha comes from another transitionary period for cinema, shortly after Jaws had claimed hegemony at the box office and blockbusters became the dominant form.  With the first blockbuster came the first attempts to capitalize on it that usually fell into one of three categories — hysterical foreign ripoffs, desperate big-budget ripoffs and cheap cash-ins. Piranha falls quite firmly in the last category and late to the party, with Dante often joking it's more of a send-up of the sequel. The opening scene, though, is unquestionably Jaws-lite, as two teenage campers canoodle in a mysterious swimming pool in the forest. There's something in the pool, and both are pulled under as the water turns crimson and the film's title card rises from the water.  



While trying to find the missing teens, a plucky private investigator (Heather Menzies) and a grizzly, extremely divorced Bradford Dillman accidentally set a school of genetically mutated piranha loose on Lost River Lake.  As the school descends toward civilization, the two are on a race to warn a summer camp where Dillman's daughter is staying, not to mention the grand opening of a new resort community by a never-sleazier Dick Miller. 

The script is as inventive as and playful as its director, though it took a while to get there. Before playwright-to-be John Sayles revised it, writer Richard Robinson had trouble figuring out a reason to get the people in the water, at first relying on a rogue bear. Once that bit of convolution was removed, Sayles wrote a script that references the B-grade horror of the past far more than Jaws and heaping satire. On the sidelines, the TV media deliver salacious commentary: “Terror. Horror. Death. Film at 11.” It’s a level of disdain Dante and Sayles retain for the media-employed cast of The Howling. The film is no less sly about it’s main villains, who one-up Jaws' corrupt mayor at every turn and include greedy land developers, government bureaucrats, irresponsible camp counselors and even mad scientists. It's in the latter that Dante first plays in Gremlins territory, utilizing Rob Bottin's excellent early stop-motion in a Bride of Frankenstein homage early on. The monsters wander around mad Dr. Hoak (Kevin McCarthy)'s laboratory aimlessly, like Harryhausen creations put to pasture or, worse, rejects from the production line. It’s equal parts creepy, vaguely forlorn and strangely funny.  Just look at this miserable bastard


Dante perfectly incorporates the insane demands of a schlock producer - including three climaxes - staged with a sense of humour at once broad and winking.  The third finale devolves into an elaborate practical joke on the audience, involving an allegedly tense 90-second countdown that in movie time manages to drag out for five minutes. Dillman must swim to a flooded smelting plant and, in one of the strangest and funniest eco-horror twists unleash toxic waste into the lake to kill the mutant fish. As the scene progresses, the countdown clock stops aligning with objective reality and every cut back to Menzies announcing how many seconds have passed is met with skepticism, then guffaw.  

Otherwise, Dante pulls out every trick he learned at Corman film school and uses them masterfully - employing skip-frame car chases and other optical tricks like the aforementioned stop-motion. It’s the kind of early resume work that would impress  industry insiders - and did. When Universal levied a lawsuit against New World Pictures, it was Spielberg who screened the film, told them to drop it and later hired Dante. Piranha can also be pretty horrific, saving one of its most brutal deaths for a likable camp counselor who is pulled into a bloody oblivion.  

Piranha is a goofy B-grade horror film played almost entirely straight. It's also the basis for a major early aughts remake where much of the same material is played for big laughs as opposed to subtle winks. Piranha 3D, directed by Alexandre Aja, sat in development hell for years in the hands of The Blob remake director Chuck Russell. By production, however, the mid-2000s were in full swing. While shockingly faithful in many respects - can’t help but turn up the laugh track. Not that Dante doesn’t hesitate to have a flying fish leap out of the water and bite Paul Bartel’s nose.  In the remake, it’s Jerry O’Connell’s penis. 

The only thing worth mentioning about the Corman-produced 1995 direct-to-video remake is it's cast list, featuring William Katt, Alexandra Paul,  Leland Orser and Mila Kunis. Though, if you're curious, you can watch it here

I still have, among my things, the dubbed VHS of Piranha with no sound, and I’ve since bought the Roger Corman classics DVD and the Shout Factory DVD. I’ve yet to upgrade further, but I will.  Physical media has unquestionably had a banner few years, and my algorithm has alerted me to the fact that there’s now a 4K in existence. Further releases have only unveiled more about the film’s history, including stories about why Menzies used a body double for a nude scene and the fact that actor Eric Braeden was used in Kevin McCarthy’s underwater shots. I love those little details found on special features now. They’ve filled in what was once an endless, wonderous, ever-mysterious void that made cinema a little more curious - completely relatable, but never fully attainable. 


Time Echoes


It's 2023 and I've found a copy of Todd Solondz' Storytelling at a thrift shop in Montreal. Now, Solondz had gone bankrupt...

 

Tuesday, October 25, 2022

Dreamcatcher: Bros in the Woods on an Oxy Trip


Oh, the level of alleged and legitimate prestige Dreamcatcher boasts - directed and co-scripted by Lawrence Kasdan (Body Heat) with the help of William Goldman (Marathon Man) from a novel by Stephen King and featuring Morgan Freeman, Thomas Jane, Damian Lewis, Timothy Olyphant and Jason Lee. The early aughts were a glorious time to be Tom Jane. He'd headline another King adaptation a few years later, and the following year would be christened The Punisher in a Marvel reboot.

                                                                                                            Image Courtesy of IMDB 


2003 was also a time like this when men (not a single woman in the main cast) could indulge their worst impulses. If Damian Lewis wanted to spend half the movie doing a hammy Malcolm Mcdowell impression, by gum, he was going to do it. If Lawrence Kasdan wanted to put The Thing in The Big Chill, no one was going to stop him.

At least King could not be entirely blamed. In this case, it was the drugs talking. King has gone on record stating that much of the writing was done under the influence of the Oxycontin he was prescribed after being nearly fatally hit by a van. There’s something crazier about Dreamcatcher, though, than just a drug haze.

For all involved, it’s best to explain Dreamcatcher’s story in one breath. For one, it might be funnier. It’s also a lot to handle, and easier to take at face value if you don’t have time to question it:

Four psychic friends - Jonesy (Lewis), Henry (Jane), Pete (Olyphant) and Beaver (Lee) - reunite for their annual hunting trip in the Maine woods at the same time as a nearby Thing-like invasion. Though a military operation led by a mad Colonel (Freeman) is largely successful early on, Jonesy is infected by the host and heads for populated areas. But the friends’ mentally challenged (also psychic) childhood pal Dudditz (Donnie Wahlberg) holds the key to stopping the invasion.

The reunion is Kasdan’s excuse to lightly remind audiences of The Big Chill. The guys gather around the table and reminisce as a pop song plays and talk about women they never slept with. Chill is a film enjoyed by exactly one generation of people, or rather a very specific subset of that generation. It pines for the glory of idealistic college days, specifically the radical 60s, but as Dave Kehr described in Chicago magazine,  “manufactures complacency.” 

It’s been a long time since Chill, and these characters aren’t the boomers-come-yuppies that Kasdan knew. There’s no relatable conversation. Their pop culture is a mix of Chillers, given their love of Roy Orbison’s “Blue Bayou” and late period 80s films that maybe would find a place in a Gen Xers heart - dramas like Promised Land, for which they misremember name of the lead, “Reefer Sutherland” (ha? He had a hit show at the time, boomer). 


Their made-up, would-be catchphrases would probably be offensive if they weren’t so downright bemusing. Perhaps not being from Maine creates the dissonance, but I doubt “Bitch in a buzzsaw” gets much play there. We understand the difference between a “fuckeree” and a “fuckerow” about as well as we know how the three seashells work in Demolition Man.

                                                                                                                    Image Courtesy of IMDB

It helps to be from 2003, knee-deep in the ephemera of the era. Dreamcatcher came out in March, two months before my high school graduation.

Maxim’s online edition was frequently on students’ browsers. 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” played the prom. Arnold Schwarzenegger successfully unseated Governor Gray Davis in a recall election in California. Lance Armstrong won his fifth Tour De France. Roy Moore was removed from Alabama federal court for refusing to remove the Ten Commandments. George W. Bush was drawing up plans for reconstructing a country he’d unlawfully invaded. And the best-selling book in the country was not anything King had written, but noted homophobe and all-around bigot Michael Savage’s Savage Nation.

Guys were fucking entitled. It was perhaps that same sense of entitlement that gave Kasdan a budget for a 136-minute sci-fi/horror remake of his most revered/reviled work. It’s worth noting that the horror community did have its own vitriolic response to The Big Chill one year previous.  Screenwriter Josh Olson has often called his feature-length directorial debut Infested a loose, vitriolic remake of the film.

Dreamcatcher gets bugnuts when the banter scene introduces a major plot point. Much of the film is spent inside Jonsey’s “memory warehouse”, a Bad Writer idea clumsily introduced in conversation.

It’s…exactly what it sounds like - a dusty library crowded with filing cabinets loaded with his memories inside his head. After the alien takes control of him, it becomes a setpiece. Jonesy must gather some private files on Dudditz and hide them in a secret room it can’t access.

Oxycontin must be some ride. It gets dumber. Guns become psychic cell phones, and Dudditz is also an alien.

And I haven’t even gotten to the shitweasels yet! Shitweasels, both in the novel and the film, are the term for the alien’s chest bursters, this time exploding out of your anus. They’re phallic worms with razor-sharp teeth that have a tendency to also go for the straight for the male genitalia. If Dreamcatcher is remembered for anything, it’s this: A sub-par CGI ripoff of Cronenbergian terror that looks recycled from the set of The Faculty.


                                                                    Image Courtesy of Filmschoolrejects.com


Dreamcatcher often feels like too many different movies to count, but the patchwork is shoddy. There are overtones of Aliens, The Thing, Independence Day, The Big Chill, Stand By Me, and even a hint of Misery. It’d be nice if the impressive ensemble helped, but they were all off doing their own thing, often in a different film. After Lewis is taken over by the alien, his aforementioned McDowell is nothing but an odd distraction. The rest appear to be phoning it in or collecting early paychecks (Olyphant suffers the worst of the bros-in-the-woods script).

Not that Dreamcatcher doesn’t know from where it borrows. The alien’s red, War of the Worlds-esque fungus is called Ripley. Freeman’s madman is Colonel Curtis, a play on Brando’s Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. These references only inspire ire, that Kasdan had the gall to compare.

I can’t say I hated Dreamcatcher. There’s fun to be had in its excesses. I often think about what the writing process must have been like. Surely, tripping on rims is going to affect your thinking, but King was also very nearly killed. New research has shown that near-death experiences actually are akin to a replay of your greatest hits. I like to imagine King, while in a hospital bed, started reliving his best moments in his memory warehouse writing It and Misery and The Body and began recording them high on greenies. One day, his publisher stops into visit while he’s asleep and in hopes the pages might wind up on the NYTimes list...

It was the early aughts. Fuck it.

Monday, September 5, 2022

Werewolves of the 80s: Wolfen, Teen Wolf and Other Things Ronald Reagan Ignored


The menagerie of well-known financial scams and Ponzi schemes in the past 40 years is too many to list. It’s got some big names on it, too. Lou Pearlman, the producer behind The Backstreet Boys (and alleged pedophile) managed to swindle investors and banks out of $300 million using fictitious companies. Pearlman was convicted in 2008 and later died in prison.

Jordan Belfort, later to be portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorcese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, managed to make off with over $200 million. He served his time and, despite calling Bitcoin a “mass delusion”, is very heavily invested in NFTs.

Then there’s the most famous flimflam artist of the 2008 crash - Bernie Madoff, whose investors came calling to reclaim their over $7 billion in investments only to learn an awful truth.

There are so many criminals on Wall Street. It’s understandable if you missed Mark Malik.

Malik, to his investors, was the hotshot manager of a hedgefund worth over $100 billion. In reality, he was a former traffic cop and waiter. It didn’t matter, even the Bloomberg Group bought his story. By the end of his run, he’d blown $850,000 of their money on online dating, dinner out and trips to the Statue of Liberty. 

Malik took a slightly different approach to his defense than most brokers would. In what can only be presumed to be an attempt to cop an insanity plea, he sent a slew of emails to investors when they demanded their returns. First, he tried to fake his death. When that failed, the emails grew deranged.

”YEAH PUT IN ME JAIL GOOD!” read one of his emails. Another, more curious response was simply, “I’m going deer hunting.” 

The last email came with a YouTube link included. He sent a “clip of a werewolf movie” to an investor he believed had reported him with the words: “THIS IS WHAT I AM NOW.”

No media outlet named from what film the clip was taken, but it’s not hard to take a guess. The two most popular results that come from “werewolf movie” on youtube are Joe Johnston’s The Wolfman and John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London.

If it was the latter, it’s almost too fitting, as werewolves and stockbrokers had a very special relationship in the 1980s. It helps to realize that they were everywhere, then.

It was hard to escape them; werewolves were rampant. Stephen King wrote a little loved novella in 1983 entitled “The Cycle of The Werewolf”, later adapted into the 1985 film Silver Bullet with Gary Busey. The werewolf craze got playwright and filmmaker John Sayles to write a satirical horror script about a colony of self-help werewolves called The Howling, directed by Joe Dante. Outside of London, John Landis turned Michael Jackson into a lycanthropic beast during  Thriller's 15-minute long music video. Even Martin Scorcese, long before The Wolf of Wall Street, re-popularized Warren Zevon's “Werewolves of London” as a pool hall anthem for The Colour of Money. The song’s title would also be reused as the name of a Commodore 64 game in 1987. 

Though one wonders if it wasn’t London, which film Malik fixated on; which work best spoke to a predatory con man. He might have chosen 1981’s Wolfen, director Michael Wadleigh’s only narrative work of fiction. If he did, he’d be the prey. 

Wolfen opens with the demolition of a slum in the South Bronx, followed by the brutal slaying of the Trumpian construction magnate responsible for it. Though environmental terrorists are the likeliest suspects, the bite wounds on the victims are not human, and the string of killings continues. Detective Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney) is paired with a criminal psychologist (Diane Venora) and a medical examiner (Gregory Hines) to solve the crime.  It's probably a good time to note that Finney plays the role with all the reckless abandon of a hungover stepdad on the weekend. It's pitch-perfect for the material, hard and cynical, extremely divorced and there's good reason a Tom Waits cameo was cut. Forget Ron Pearlman, the Tom Waits biopic should have been made right then and there. 




A procedural/horror hybrid, Wolfen is not the most traditional werewolf movie - some would even argue that it’s not even of that subgenre. It’s a film rich with social commentary still quite relevant, as crises such as housing shortages worsen. It, like many werewolf allegories of the 80s, fit in well with SDGs 10 and 11.

As implied, Wolfen features none of the traditional werewolf staples - no transformation scenes, no curses. Instead, Wolfen’s procedural elements lead Wilson to a crew of Native American construction workers. Their leader, Eddie Holt (Edward James Olmos), has no problem admitting he’s a shapeshifter. 

Shapeshifters, in the film’s lore, can exchange spirits with those of animals - eagles, horses, and wolves. In real mythology, it has roots in Greek Literature but is most commonly associated in North America with the indigenous mythos.  

Native shapeshifters play both positive and negative roles in folklore. In Navajo culture, an evil witch or shaman can transform into an animal to cause destruction. This is known as skinwalking

There’s no question who’s responsible for the murders in Wolfen, as Eddie explains to Wilson in a bar after a frightening encounter.

“The smartest ones, they went underground. Into the new wilderness - your cities. Into the great slum areas, the graveyard of your f—--g species,” he explains.  Now, the wolves’ hunting ground has been invaded by high-rise apartment condos full of coke-addled socialites.

Wolfen directly points to the regentrification of New York City in the late 70s and early 80s as the cause for the slayings, but the Natives in the film are already marginalized enough. The reason Wilson is even aware of Holt and his crew is due to their past criminality, and they are only suitable for dangerous labour - construction at nausea-inducing heights.

Wadleigh, in his only film not about Woodstock, was one of the first to employ thermographic video techniques for the POV of the monster, made famous later in films like Predator.  It’s stunning here, as wolves stalk Finney through crumbled churches and tenements. The South Bronx of Wolfen is barren, depopulated. The churches and tenement buildings look positively war-torn. In 1980 New York, there was no shortage of rubble to film. 




In the 70s, New York lost 825,000 people. All in all, 600,000 impoverished were displaced. During this time, the South Bronx saw 80 percent of its housing units and population decimated.

Gretchen Hildebrand and Vivian Vazquez’ 2018 PBS documentary Decade on Fire offers the most concise and rage-inspiring picture of exactly what happened. It was a lot of little things. Since the ’50s, the neighbourhood was famous for its eclectic racial make-up of Puerto Ricans and blacks. By the end of the decade, they comprised two-thirds of the population there. When the rest of the country was segregated, it was an impossibility just below East 138th street. The racial makeup made the area a target for redlining, the discriminatory practice of declaring areas largely populated by nonwhites as in decline. When a neighbourhood was in decline, that meant that loans would not be given out there, fire insurance would be denied. The buildings were left to fall apart and burn.

Meanwhile in Manhattan, urban renewal, or as James Baldwin called it, “Negro removal” was implemented. Thousands were displaced to the South Bronx, further crowding the neglected buildings. 


The first fire burned in 1968, a tenement building, then another. Buildings mysteriously started to catch fire throughout the South Bronx. When the fires began, the FDNY chief had a simple explanation: you get a lot of immigrants together in unfamiliar surroundings, fires are bound to break out. 

In reality, the landlords didn’t care. They didn’t even turn the boilers on during the freezing New York winters. Neglected buildings meant neglected wiring. Fires were, indeed, bound to break out. It got so bad the fire department stopped filing reports.

If the fires were set by residents, they were usually caught and confessed that they were paid to set the building alight. Contemporary news stories didn’t bother to mention who might have paid them, but it’s not hard to guess looking at some of the insurance payouts to landlords.

As New York slid toward bankruptcy, Mayor John Lindsay called on the RAND Corporation for help. Without getting too technical, RAND’s computers, already known for helping decimate life in Vietnam, advised that Lindsay close some firehouses to save money. Over the course of the 70s, 12 firehouses were closed in the area. All of this was occurring at the same time a counselor to President Nixon, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was pushing the policy of “benign neglect.”

President Carter pledged to help, but was voted out of office before anything was put in motion, replaced by a former actor who told the neighbourhood, “No politician can wave a magic wand!” In the end, it was the residents who helped save the South Bronx. Not only did they lobby against the exploitation films that came out of that decade such as The Warriors and Fort Apache, The Bronx, their own culture thrived. Moreover, the People’s Development Corporation was founded and began renovating buildings. A group of carpenters trained residents to work on their own homes. The group soon inspired offshoots. 



Wadleigh was always disappointed Wolfen was taken as a horror film and not a serious political work. It’s a shame it wasn’t taken more seriously, as it works incredibly well in both contexts.  Finney’s investigation is helped by a RAND-like corporation, that employs high-tech lie-detectors well outside the NYPD budget. And of course, the corporation’s first suspects are angry activists. At no point is any of this addressed directly in the film, the RAND-like agents are simply present - like they always should have been a part of the investigation.

It’s happening now, likely where you live. History is certainly repeating in the South Bronx, as residents are fighting to resist gentrification. Decade of Fire climaxes with the same residents who rebuilt the South Bronx aligning to battle a corporate takeover. In Canada, algorithms like the ones RAND used to determine the necessity of firehouses are now making racist decisions. New ad-blocking technologies mean houses, when they are available, aren’t even marketed to minorities.

We’ve seen the protections granted to landlords run rampant during the pandemic, with New York almost never prosecuting one for a DIY eviction.

In Toronto, low-cost apartment complexes are facing demolition all over the city in favour of condominiums. Forget benign neglect, the response from politicians is out and out brutality, raiding encampments of the displaced. 

Or perhaps Malik longed for his glory days of high school (he never did have a college degree) when he realized the law was cracking down and thought of 1985’s Teen Wolf.  He may have identified with Scott Howard (Michael J. Fox), the teen basketball player whose greatest hurdle in life is that he’s only average. At first, Howard has none of the problems that the poor Natives of Wolfen experienced. He lives in suburban bliss. He has no financial issues, he already has an attractive girl interested in him at the start of the film and his only real aim is to win the big game.

The problem is that he’s a gypsy, or that’s what the film alleges without saying aloud. Though the spinoff MTV series from 2011 does go into further detail on the matter, the film only suggests it.

At no point is it suggested anyone in the family was bitten by a werewolf.  Like Vampirism, Werewolf lore includes countless ways of being turned into one without being bitten, one of the most commonly used in the U.S. after The Wolfman in 1941 was a gypsy bloodline.  The word is never said in the film, and it’s unlikely it ever came up in production.

The Howards are, however, still outsiders. Scott is not particularly popular, he’s a child of either divorce or widowhood (it’s never clear) and both he and his father are the subjects of bullying. 

The curse has also provided the family some unwanted town notoriety; a long-standing feud between Scott’s father and the principal about his werewolfism provides a small roadblock later, and he regularly talks about how he feels socially inadequate.

Yet, despite this, Scott hangs around Stiles - who wears shirts that say: “Obnoxious” and “What Are You Lookin’ at, Dicknose?”

Stiles plays a key role in Teen Wolf as Scott’s confidant. After learning of his curse, he breaks the news to his best friend. This results in what at the time would have been hilarious, or at least commonplace, results:

“I’ve gotta talk to you about something because it’s making me nuts.”

“Are you gonna tell me you’re a f_?” Because if you’re going to tell me you’re a f_, I don’t think I can handle it.”

“We made a joke, and it was just meant to be a joke,” said screenwriter Jeph Loeb. “ It wasn’t a commentary; it wasn’t about coming out. We were just two young guys, and we were making jokes.”

Teen Wolf movie slur
The captioning really
doesn't do it justice. 


At the time, Vincent Canby of The New York Times called Teen Wolf “aggressively boring.” And it would be today if it weren’t so fascinatingly offensive. The fat kids are called fat and the girls are sex objects. For his part, Howard is completely unsympathetic, blaming his father’s meager town position as a hardware store owner for the reason the prettiest blonde ignores him.

It’s especially vexing given the likely origin of Scott’s condition. Gypsies, along with homosexuals, were among those put in concentration camps by real-life SS Nazi troops. Some were known as Werewolves. It’s even further irritating - grating - when body horror transformations in the genre were being used to explore a very real crisis in the 80s. 

Rock Hudson died the year Teen Wolf was released. A friend of the Reagan family, the actor had been diagnosed with AIDS a year earlier, becoming one of the first actors to come out and disclose his diagnosis. Though this led to Reagan’s first public acknowledgment of the disease, it’s since come to light that his wife Nancy refused to help Hudson get treatment. 

Scott’s werewolfism is not much of a hindrance, he’s even aided by it, winning the big game and impressing on the dance floor. He doesn’t get the pretty blonde, but only because he doesn’t want her, opting for his brunette friend instead. He’s a werewolf, but he’s white.

We never got a Werewolf AIDS movie, not one that specifically made the connection, but it’s evident in any body horror. The condition of a werewolf pre-transformation is often more horrifying when it starts from a normal human body. In Dante’s The Howling, however, serial killer and werewolf Eddie Quist (Robert Picardo) looks like he’s infected by something else prior to transforming, covered in sweat and matted hair. While he’s taken a bullet to the head, it wasn’t silver. He looks sickly.



What, one wonders, might a stockbroker or any power player in the financial game identify with from werewolf lore?  It can’t possibly be the outsider status that films like Landis’ London explore, where an American Jewish tourist is ostracized. Wall Street brokers are notorious for their clan-like activity. Outsiders aren’t welcome. They don’t take kindly to homosexuals, either

The only attraction evident comes from wolf behavior; the party pack of elite hunters that prey on the nightlife like the irritatingly oft-quoted “wolf pack” of The Hangover franchise. Indeed, a controversial and popular practice exists amongst hedgefund managers known as “Wolf Pack Activism”, in which one investor will seize on a company or property aggressively, attracting the others. This is done to seize control over the company without the need of reporting your holdings to the SEC.  Bonding with nature and the deeper spiritual connection that Eddie Holt describes is lost on them until it rips out their jugular.  


An alternate, abridged version of this piece ran on artshelp on June 4, 2022.