Ten Statements About....THE PROPHECY (1995)

"I'm a tweety bird...CAW! CAW!"

“Do you know how you got that dent, in your top lip? Way back, before you were born, I told you a secret, then I put my finger there and I said "Shhhhh!"

1) I love the care and attention with which director Gregory Widen maintains his mythology for this film, especially his ‘biology’ of the angels within.  Something as simple as the way the preferred state of rest for angels is perching like a bird adds a degree of otherness that gives the film something extra.

2) Yes, this film is carried mainly by Christopher Walken being Christopher Walken...but the intriguing thing is that this is Walken at the beginning of that phase in his career.  As such, Gabriel is a fully rounded character full of rage, pride, arrogance and jealousy with only peeks of the Walken-as-Walken quirkiness coming through (I’m looking at you, trumpet lessons scene...)

3) What I wouldn’t give for a film which has Viggo Mortensen’s Lucifer front and center.  Every second he’s on screen in the third act, your eyes are drawn to him.  And thankfully the script never loses sight of how Lucifer is motivated solely by selfish reasons.

(Hell, what I wouldn’t give for a film where Mortensen’s Lucifer and Peter Stomare’s First Of The Fallen from Constantine hang out together....)

4) I honestly don’t know if the whole Amerind aspect of the story has any point whatsoever.  I suspect you could take out everything related to the reservation and still have a full story.  Maybe it’s because Widen had cast Moriah Shining Dove Snyder (who should be called Shining Teeth considering how bright those choppers are) in the central role of Mary.  Given how limited Ms. Snyder’s acting range is, maybe the film would have been served better to have gone with a different actress and dispense with the gratuitious Amerind Ritualizing.

"He ain't human...so I ain't taking him to Mendy's!"

5) The thing that always bothers me about Elias Koteas as a leading man is how generic he is.  There’s nothing wrong with his performance per se--there are a couple of moments where he acquits himself quite well, in fact.  But he tends to melt into the background and remind me of other, better actors.  In this film in particular he keeps blurring into a sort of lumpen version of Adrien Brody crossed with Robert deNiro.

6) This film needed Steve Hynter’s Joseph.  The first half of this film is so dour that we needed someone like him to provide much needed comic relief.  Hynter plays Joseph well, as someone secure enough in his intelligence that he can goof a bit...and if the facts are the facts, he won’t disbelieve that.

7) I don’t know who the person was who thought Virginia Madsen would look good as a brunette is, but he needs to be stopped.

8)  ...although I wonder if my response to Madsen is due not to her appearance, but because her character Katherine is all over the place.  Widen’s script seems to force so many aspects on her--she’s weirdly placed in the role of surrogate mother to Mary, she’s got this teacher thing going, she has to be the love interest, she has to be an exposition dump--that she becomes diffuse.  Unlike Koteas’ Thomas, who does have a single strong throughline, Katherine is everything to everyone, and becomes nothing to no one.

"And then David Cronenberg snuck up behind me and
whispered 'Boo!'  He does that a lot."

9) I don’t know how I feel about Eric Stoltz’s Samuel.  I get the impression he’s trying to be a bad ass at times, and he fails...but there are other moments where he’s called on to be a manipulator, especially when he reaches Chimney Rock, and there he excels.  If Widen had lessened the former and emphasized the later, we might have ended up with a more effective character.

10) It’s kind of sad that this was Widen’s only theatrical film as a director.  Throughout this film, there are lots of striking visual moments that indicate that he could’ve been a real contender, even if he stuck to genre filmmaking.

Overall...a rather striking horror film both visually and narratively in spite of its flaws.  Granted, I wish that Dimension hadn’t tried to force a franchise out of this one little gem (four sequels!), but taken on it’s own it’s worth a watch.

Ten Statements About....SLAM DANCE (1987)

"I wanted to be different for a long time. But I was the same. I was always the same. I can't go back."

1) I now understand why Tom Hulce didn't have the career so many people thought he would after Amadeus...dude's got a Bobble Head. I mean, his melon is so huge. His inability to actually convince me he's in danger all the while he's being chased around by the New Wave Scumbag Detectives might have something to do with it as well.

2) Since this is an attempt to recast a noir story in a New Wave context, we've got a number of characters played by actual New Wave musicians. Adam Ant, playing Hulce's agent, is actually pretty good (and it's not for nothing that Mr. Ant had an actual career in Hollywood for a few years, mainly playing heavies), as is John Doe as one of the New Wave Scumbag Detectives (and like Mr. Ant, Doe had a small acting career as well), but Mitchell Froom is a little too 'Kid Playing Cowboy'...and since he has the largest role of the three, I'm not impressed.

3) It's interesting how the deeper Hulce's Drood gets into the mystery, the color palette of the film subtly changes, with the brighter reds and blues of the New Wave portion is swapped for the darker, more sombre tones more appropriate for a film noir.

4) Boy, I think my friend Derrick is right...Harry Dean Stanton was born a middle aged man. I do find it amusing that Stanton has the most new-wave name (Detective Smiley--and we do learn down the line that it is his actual name!), and is the most noirish character.

5) Now this film runs an hour and forty minutes--but it would run a little under ninety minutes if director Wayne Wang hadn't indulged in his art-house sensibilities and given us a number of very, very lengthy montages. Hell, the next-to-last scene includes something like three or four minutes of Hulce's preparation for what he's about to do.

6) And Wang's art-house-iness also invades the mystery itself. At its core it's about a sex scandal--but since Wang puts such a peculiar spin on said sex scandal (why are the men wearing Scuba masks? Why is Virginia Madsen sitting in a shallow fountain?), it actually serves to muddy the water rather than illuminating it. Hell, I didn't realize there was a sex scandal until the film was halfway over, even though the scandal is introduced very early on in the film's running time.

7) And speaking of Virginia Madsen....My God, does she fill out that one party dress exquisitely (that was the main selling point of the film in its original run after all). Her role is extremely small, but she does fill it out well.

And yes, I did intend that statement to have a whiff of double entendre....

8) Adam Ant in tiny blue shorts and a snapback cap with a comical moose face on it....some things cannot be unseen.

9) This is one of those neo-noirs--Romeo Is Bleeding is another one-- where there's not a single character who's really sympathetic. And, like Romeo Is Bleeding, the realization that the main character's wife is as scummy as everyone else is the one that sinks the film as a whole for me.

10) And sadly, this is one of those films where the director dresses the film up in the trappings of a social movement without making the film unique to said social movement. It's not as bad as the so-called psychedelic films of the 60's in that respect, it is pretty disingenuous.

Overall...at times very frustrating in its art-house-iness and seeming disinterest in being the new wave detective story it claims it is, this is still intriguing as an artifact of it's time...and, to be fair, it was for the longest time the only place you could hear my favorite Stan Ridgway track of all time, the demented 'Bing Can't Walk.'