The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection
- Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
- Год: 1992
- Язык: английский
- Год: St.Martin’s Press
- Жанр: Ужасы
Электронная книга - «The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection». Краткое содержание книги:
The American film industry came through just fine with Jonathan Demme’s film translation of Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs. Minimally graphic, this bombshell way outclassed all the other new films of terror. I’ve got no problem with the aesthetic of carnography, but that makes me all the more admire filmmakers who can create intensity in a movie with tools other than a simple violent bludgeon. Writing, acting, editing and cinematography can certainly help. The Silence of the Lambs made an instant shivery pop star of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter, and deservedly so. But that shouldn’t detract from Jodie Foster’s strong performance as the smart, courageous, FBI rookie. Scott Glenn was almost invisible as her boss, which is too bad. Interestingly, both The Vanishing and The Silence of the Lambs are adaptations of novels. I haven’t read the progenitor of the former, Tim Krabbe’s The Golden Egg, but I am a great fan of Harris’s novel. The script was a successful version of a very good book.
I also have a low-budget fondness in my heart for Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs. This was an inexpensive horror comedy with no element of the occult, despite the rather misleading print campaign. The story’s about a young black boy called Fool who attempts action when there’s a landlord threat to raze the ghetto tenement in which his family lives, so that a new corporate tower can rise. Turns out, the greedy landlords are a psychotic couple who live in a sprawling old mansion, keep a lovely little blonde girl named Alice imprisoned in the attic, have a passel of Romero zombie look-alikes in the basement and are determined to replace the whole ghetto with pricey urban renewal projects. The humor’s a little campy, but I was amused. When the police come to investigate neighborhood complaints of a shoot-out that would rival scenes in The Wild Bunch, the couple’s spruced everything up. They’re dressed just like Ward and June Cleaver, elevator Muzak is piped over the home’s sound system, and they’ve reversed the growling, glowering painting of their Doberman pinscher to show a benign, cute-doggie portrait. The high-concept description of this movie’s goal would be: What if John Sayles set out to create a modern, urban fairy tale in the mode of Edward Scissorhands? Wes Craven’s reach exceeds his grasp, but it’s a wonderful attempt and a great comeback.
For out-and-out fantasy, the champ is probably Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. This animated feature has become an instant classic. The music’s not terribly memorable, but everything else is. Robby Benson as the voice of the Beast? Yes, he’s fine. Charges have been leveled that this movie is feminist propaganda. Strong, competent and altogether admirable, the heroine is a good role model for kids and an attractor for adults.
There were a couple of good romantic ghost fantasies, one very popular, the other rather more successful at what it set out to do. The popular one was Dead Again, directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh, along with his wife, Emma Thompson. The production values were lavish, the craft superb but the story was a bit wooden and all too predictable. Then there was Truly, Madly, Deeply, directed by Anthony Minghella, which featured a kinder, gentler Allan Rickman. If your only image of Rickman is as the cold, deadly villain in Die Hard, or the scenery-gobbling Sheriff in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, then rent a cassette of Truly, Madly, Deeply. You’ll enjoy it.
There wasn’t a whole lot of big-screen, unabashed science fiction in 1991. The one feature that most people in America saw was Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Director James Cameron followed up his own megahit Terminator almost as successfully as he did Ridley Scott’s Alien. This was the highest grossing film of the year, to the tune of a fifth of a billion bucks. This adventure epic of a boy and his terminator succeeded not just because of the incredible effects (the shapechanging technology, which created the water creature in the Abyss and transmuted Michael Jackson into a black kitty, has lately been selling Goodyear allweather tires), but because the movie actually has heart. The relationships between mother, son and cyborg transcend the superficial. Linda Hamilton actually has the tougher acting role—her character is psychologically valid, but has to go through an incredible amount of change with only a limited opportunity afforded by the script. There’s moxie here, and some brain and an awful lot of action.
The other science fiction film of the year was Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country directed by Nicholas Meyer. Neither the best nor the worst of the series, it was a fine grace note to sound as Gene Roddenberry transported from this plane. The plot was a nice reflection of contemporary realpolitik, the blood-globules-in-zero-gee effect was great, and Christian Slater stole a chunk of the show with a walk-on. No smart cookies are laying bets that there won’t be a Star Trek VII.
Okay, let’s look at a smorgasbord of what else was playing out there. This is certainly not all the cinema of the fantastic released during the year, but it’s a sampling I think covers the spectrum.
Switch was the year’s high-water mark for the rash of essentially dumb gender/ life-and-death/age-switching movies. Although it wasn’t Blake Edwards’s greatest moment, this comedy of a swinish yuppy who is murdered and then transmigrates into the body of a woman (he’s been very, very bad to females) works for one reason—Ellen Barkin. She plays the karma-cursed sexist with a keenly nasty edge.
Albert Brooks’s Defending Your Life was an earnest and slightly plodding treatment of fate in that twilight zone between Heaven and Hell. The characters’ backdrops—celestial cities composited from real and imaginary earthly buildings—were masterfully realized. Their lines needed a bit more wit, more bite.
The surprise Christmas hit was The Addams Family (it has made about $100 million). The characters looked great, especially Anjelica Huston as Morticia. Some of the best jokes came from the original Addams cartoons. They were freighted, however, with the more banal feel of the TV series (that juxtaposition has led to a lawsuit filed by the creator of the TV show against the makers of the feature). This is a good kids movie for adults.
Perhaps the most obscure science fiction adventure of the year was Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man. Starring Mickey Rourke and Don Johnson, this peculiar melodrama takes place a mere handful of years in the future. A manic (as ever) Rourke and a disheveled Johnson (actually quite good) become embroiled in corporate chicanery and have to deal with a squad of lethal goons who dress in black Kevlar dusters. No one seems to understand the value of head-shots in situations like this, nor that Kevlar only stops slugs—not the force behind them. The movie contains one enormous inside joke probably intelligible only to L.A. residents: in the future, Burbank Airport will become one of the great high-tech, big-money, international crossroads. . . .