CLOVERFIELD *
DIRECTED BY Matt Reeves
STARRING Michael Stahl-David, Jessica Lucas, T.J. Miller
US 2008 84 mins.
30 DAYS OF NIGHT ***
DIRECTED BY David Slade
STARRING Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Danny Huston
US 2007 113 mins.
RAMBO **
DIRECTED BY Sylvester Stallone
STARRING Sylvester Stallone, Julie Benz, Paul Schulze
US 2008 93 mins.
Action? Horror? Right away, sir! And how would you like that dripping slab of meat? Thick and raw, like John Rambo used to make? Spitting blood, vampire-style? Or maybe with a side of YouTube-generation meta-comment, as in Cloverfield, which opened to deafening hype in the US and Europe a couple of weeks ago? Even (some) serious critics have been singing its praises, like veteran Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog: “In my heart of hearts,” wrote Mr. Lucas, “I have a creeping suspicion that Cloverfield may be the most important horror movie (or horrifying movie) I’ve seen in a long time, maybe since The Exorcist or Taxi Driver or Cannibal Holocaust, because it gave me the same apocalyptic feeling those films did when I first saw them – a sense that movies, as I knew them, would never be the same again.”
‘Whoa!’ as Hud might put it – Hud being the (mostly unseen) cameraman who just keeps on filming as Manhattan is attacked by a monster, Godzilla-style. The whole film purports to be Hud’s home-video record of the onslaught, punctuated by a steady stream of affably brain-dead comments that recall Keanu Reeves in his Bill and Ted days (Hud’s greatest fear is that he and his friends will end up “totally dead”). Meanwhile, the gang wander gingerly through a city of crushed cars and bombed-out buildings, trying to find Beth whom Rob is, like, totally hot for. Will the monster get her first? Because that would suck.
To the film’s credit, it doesn’t pull its punches – but of course, for all the talk of cutting-edge cinema, it’s been done before, nine years ago in The Blair Witch Project. That’s the one with youngsters getting lost in the woods – and it’s actually a lot more disturbing than Cloverfield, precisely because the heroes of Blair Witch were lost; the home-video visuals were part of their nightmare, as if Reality itself had mutated into something artificial and unreliable. The young people here, on the other hand, may be facing crisis but it’s not existential crisis; they’re not being plagued by a nameless fear that might be inside their heads. The fear is real (it’s eating up most of Manhattan), like the onrushing crowds and screams of “Oh my god! Oh my god!”. In short, they’re inside a monster movie – or maybe a disaster movie, the scene where they crawl between skyscrapers playing like a scene from Poseidon. Either way, it doesn’t cut deep.
So why the hyper-realistic fa?ade of zooms, handheld lurches and arbitrary cuts in the middle of scenes? Because it’s trendy; that’s what they like, the kids today. “I can just see this turning up on the Internet,” says someone in the party scenes that precede the monster – and it’s by now a truism to note the way YouTube has transformed (some) people’s lives, blurring the line between reality and showbiz. Hud keeps filming, even in the midst of chaos, because “people need to SEE this; it’s going to be IMPORTANT” – making himself a Witness to History, the same kind of self-absorption as Rob rifling through an electronics store, looking for a battery for his mobile phone, even as the world around him is going to hell.
How does Cloverfield view its heroes? The last line we hear before the monster attacks is: “Forget the world, and hang on to the people you care about the most” – a line interrupted by explosions in the distance, like the explosions which heralded 9/11. The reference is unavoidable – and the gang do forget the world in the hours that follow, going off to rescue their friend, but maybe that wasn’t so smart because 9/11 proved one thing, that the world can’t be forgotten; it’s a small step from Manhattan to Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s where Cloverfield starts to get interesting – but it doesn’t follow through, doesn’t dare stick the knife in its target audience. Because that would suck.
It’s hard to avoid seeing horror films in the context of real-life horrors (especially if they happen to be American). 9/11 looms large in Cloverfield – and is it just me, or do the vampires in 30 Days of Night behave a lot like terrorists? These aren’t the wandering undead of Transylvania, swooping down on the population in nightly visits; they’re more like a sleeper cell, taking out a small Alaskan settlement in a calculated strike – waiting for the winter month of darkness (30 days of night) then disabling the inhabitants’ means of escape before launching their attack. They don’t plan to “turn” them (i.e. convert them), they just plan to kill them. As for being ‘Other’ … well, Bela Lugosi may have been a foreigner in a black cape, but at least he spoke English. This lot speak their own demonic tongue, studded with scary high-pitched screeching; their teeth are rotten, their fingernails long and sharp. To quote Fred Ward in the not-too-dissimilar Tremors: “No way these are local boys”.
As in Tremors (and most monster movies), the setting’s a small, remote community where everyone knows each other. As in Tremors, our heroes are rugged individualists having to think their way out of trouble, the monster(s) being too big and powerful to be taken on directly (they make their move under cover of a snow blizzard, their only advantage over the vampires being that they know the town and they know the climate). The difference is, director David Slade is out to make a gore-drenched horror rather than an old-fashioned ‘creature feature’; the main inspiration seems to be Night of the Living Dead, referenced in the scene with a child vampire feasting on her elders. The film is very violent, and extremely intense – though its most shocking moment happens offscreen, the sickening thud of an axe hitting flesh behind a closed door.
There’s only one big problem with 30 Days of Night, viz. it should’ve been called ‘3 Days of Night’ and taken place in a much tighter time-frame. It’s impossible to stretch out the tension over so many days – and in fact implausible, given the vampires’ efficiency. What do they do for three weeks after polishing off most of the town in a matter of hours? Why don’t they track down our heroes? How can the latter survive for 10 days in the sheriff’s office? Still, the film is very atmospheric, the town like a Wild West hamlet huddled in dirty snow (early on, when sheriff Josh Hartnett has to take care of a strange prisoner who insists his friends are coming to free him, there’s an echo of Western scenarios like Rio Bravo) – and Slade comes up with one shot that’s among the Moments of the Year. With the vampire invasion in full swing, the camera takes up a vantage point high above the rooftops – then slowly tracks down Main Street, mapping all the various kinds of carnage going on at the same time. Here, a group of vampires gorge on a fallen victim. There, a person screams, overpowered. Here, another tries (in vain) to shoot the monsters, the orange bursts of gunfire tearing at the half-light, the dark shapes of buildings and the shroud of snow blotched with crimson pools of blood. It’s terrifying.
30 Days of Night is rated ‘18’, of course. So is Rambo – or John Rambo, as it’s being called in Europe – though in this case it’s hard to say what’s more terrifying: the depredations carried out by sadistic Burmese troops or the gory revenge wreaked by John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone), the Vietnam vet and all-round killing machine who hasn’t been seen onscreen since 1988. It’s bad enough when the soldiers attack a village: limbs are blown off, little kids killed point-blank, a baby snatched from its mother and thrown to its death (later on, the dead are left hanging from beams and a severed head stuck on a pole). But it’s no easier to watch when Rambo counter-attacks, at one point grabbing a soldier and ripping out the man’s throat with his bare hands (what was wrong with just snapping his neck?). Was this graphic detail really necessary?
Maybe not – but that’s what Stallone does, and much of the buzz in Rambo comes from seeing the director-star (now aged 61) still unreconstructed, and brutal as ever. 20 years ago, people complained that Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) cheapened the memory of the Vietnam War; now, the same people might complain that starting your action flick with horrible footage of real-life Burmese atrocities smacks of exploitation – and they’d be right, but Stallone is like that. He’s insensitive; yet he’s not dishonest. Rambo is barbaric and in some ways Neanderthal, yet it does have a worldview – viz. that aggression is innate, not learned, and violence is in all men. “When you’re pushed,” grunts our hero, “killing is as easy as breathing”.
The film has Rambo – now retired to a life of snake-catching in Thailand’s backwaters – leading a group of missionaries up the river to Burma (no-one says Myanmar) to deliver humanitarian aid. Rambo thinks weapons would be better, but the chief missionary disagrees. Helping is better than fighting, he says – taking a life is never okay; needless to say, he ends up killing soldiers in the final battle. Rambo teams up with a group of mercenaries, and they’re not all sympathetic (some are quite obnoxious) yet they are heroic, because they comprehend the film’s Message: “War is in your blood. Don’t fight it.”
Agree? Disagree? It barely matters. Rambo’s bound to get up people’s noses – some will also call it racist and homophobic – but the old-school, crunchingly physical action scenes are guaranteed to connect with its target audience. Reaction to Cloverfield, on the other hand, was almost as tepid when I caught it at the Cineplex last week as audience reaction to The Blair Witch Project nine years ago, disappointment verging on outright scorn (“Is that it?” asked someone disbelievingly). Moral of the story? Action and horror are best served without too many side-dishes.
