Horror Film Review: The Craft (dir by Andrew Fleming)

Posted on October 16, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This 1996 film tells the story of four witches, all of whom attend the same very judgmental high school.

Nancy (Fairuza Balk) is their leader, the one who is most dedicated to worshiping the ancient deity “Manon.” Nacy dressed in black, like all good people. She also lives in a trailer park with her pervy stepfather and her chainsmoking mother. Sarcastic and quick with an insult, Nancy is an outcast and she’s proud of it.

Bonnie (Neve Campbell) is the quiet witch. She’s the one who wears baggy clothes and hardly ever seems to wash her hair. She’s insecure because her back is covered in scars, the result of a car accident. Bonnie follows Nancy’s orders.

Rochelle (Rachel True) is the witch who never seems to get to do much. As one of the only black students at the high school, she faces constant discrimination. She likes to swim. To be honest, we don’t find out much about Rochelle beyond that.

And then there’s Sarah (Robin Tunney). She’s the new girl at school, having just moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Bonnie is the first one who notices that Sarah has powers of her own. Even though Sarah is, at first, freaked out by Nancy’s talk of Manon, she eventually joins the group after a male student, the loathsome Chris Hooker (Skeet Ulrich), starts to spread rumors about her.

Together …. they solve crimes!

No, actually, they don’t. Instead, they cast spells. Fortunately, now that Sarah has joined the group, they’re finally powerful enough to actually make their spells mean something. Soon, each girl is getting exactly what she wants but they’ve forgotten the Rule of Three — every action returns to you threefold.

And, even worse, Nancy’s starting to act just a little bit crazed….

I love The Craft. In fact, to be honest, I have yet to meet anyone who doesn’t love the film. That doesn’t mean that the film is flawless, of course. There’s actually a whole lot of things that I could point out that don’t quite work about this film. For instance, the character of Rochelle is totally underdeveloped. Robin Tunney, as good an actress as she is, sometimes seems to be miscast as Sarah. (It’s hard not to feel that she and Neve Campbell should have switched roles.) The film starts out as a clever and sharp-tongued satire but it kind of loses its way towards the end, becoming a far more conventional supernatural thriller.

But no matter! Sometimes, the flaws just don’t matter. The Craft works because anyone who has ever felt like an outcast — and, let’s just be honest, that’s pretty much everyone — can relate to the film. At some point in their life, everyone has felt ostracized. Everyone has felt like they were on the outside looking in. Everyone has wished that they had the ability to cast a spell whenever they wanted. Everyone has felt like Sarah, Bonnie, and Rochelle and, even more importantly, everyone has felt like vengeful Nancy.

Perhaps appropriately, it’s the actress who plays Nancy, Fairuza Balk, who steals the entire film. It’s not that the other actors are bad. Indeed, the strong and likable cast is one of this film’s main strengths. But no one can quite match Balk’s intensity as Nancy. Balk manages to remain believable even while going totally over the top. In the end, Nancy is the most compelling character in the film. She may be a villain. She may kill a few people. But she’s also the only character willing to stand up for herself. Sarah’s magic may be powerful but she never seems to be having much fun with it. Nancy, on the other hand, is all about showing off what one can do with enough power.

I rewatched The Craft a few Halloweens ago and I’m glad that I did. It provided the perfect conclusion to that year’s October holiday. I look forward to watching it again in the future.

New Orleans Film Review: Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans (dir by Werner Herzog)

Posted on February 13, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Do you think fish dream?”

— Terrence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)

Happy Mardi Gras!

Since today is not only Fat Tuesday but also rapidly coming to a close, I think it’s time for me to share one final New Orleans film review. Admittedly, though this film takes place and was filmed in New Orleans, it doesn’t feature any Mardi Gras scenes. However, it does feature a lead performance that is perhaps as bizarre as anything that you’re likely to see in the French Quarter tonight. Of course, I’m talking about Werner Herzog’s 2009 film, Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans.

Whenever I mention this movie to anyone, it only takes a few minutes before they get around to saying, “What was the deal with the iguanas?” Everyone remembers the two iguanas who would randomly show up throughout the movie. At one point, they were sitting in a coffee table while Lt. Terrence McDonagh (Nicholas Cage) and Sgt. Stevie Pruit (Val Kilmer) were watching a house across the street. When McDonagh demanded to know why the iguanas were on his coffee table, Pruit replied, “There ain’t no iguanas.” McDonagh looked down at them and grinned. This was followed by several hand-held close-ups of the iguanas, looking around inquisitively while McDonagh kept giving them the side eye.

The iguanas show up a second time, after McDonagh has tricked one gangster into killing another gangster. “Shoot him again,” McDonagh demands, “his soul’s still dancing!” Herzog pans over to show us that, indeed, the man’s soul is still dancing next to his corpse. After the soul gets shot down, an iguana wanders across the floor.

What do the iguanas represent? Some people think that they actually are meant to be hallucinations. As the result of a back injury that he received saving a prisoner during Hurricane Katrina, McDonagh has permanent back problems and this has led to him getting hooked on drugs. The perpetually high McDonagh sees and does a lot of bizarre things over the course of this movie. Perhaps the iguanas are just a part of his addiction.

Myself, I think the iguanas represent the fact that, no matter what McDonagh and anyone else in New Orleans does over the course of the film, the randomness of nature is going win out in the end. After all, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans opens with Katrina, which is perhaps the ultimate example of how helpless modern society is in the face of nature’s whims. The film takes places in neighborhoods that have yet to recover from the flooding. Every corner of the film is full of physical, emotional, and mental debris. McDonagh pops pills and snorts cocaine in an attempt to maintain some semblance of control but ultimately, the iguanas are going to show up regardless of how much control he thinks he has. Just as how Klaus Kinski, at the end of Aguirre, The Wrath Of God, couldn’t keep the monkeys off of his raft, Terrence McDonagh can’t keep the iguanas off of his coffee table.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans apparently started life as a reboot of Abel Ferrara’s 1992 film, Bad Lieutenant. The script (which was credited to William M. Finkelstein) is full of moments that mirror scenes from Ferrara’s film. Once again, the protagonist is a corrupt police lieutenant who spends almost the entire film fucked up on drugs and whose only friend is a prostitute. Again, there’s a disturbing scene in which the lieutenant harasses a young woman in a parking lot. Again, the lieutenant has gambling debts and again, the lieutenant has to solve a horrifying crime.

While promoting his film, Herzog always said that 1) he had never seen Bad Lieutenant and 2) he didn’t even know who Abel Ferrara was. Judging from the way Herzog directs the film, which is the complete opposite of the approach that Ferrara took to similar material, I’m inclined to believe Herzog. Whereas Ferrara’s film was a grim and humorless plunge into the depths of Hell, Herzog takes an almost satirical approach to the story. The running joke throughout Herzog’s film is that the bad lieutenant gets results precisely because he is so thoroughly messed up and incompetent. The final part of Herzog’s film features so many sudden twists and turns that it’s hard not to conclude that Herzog is poking fun at how American crime films always have to wrap everything up within the final fifteen minutes, regardless of how messy or convoluted their plots may be. Whereas Ferrara’s film featured Harvey Keitel naked and bellowing in soul-searing pain, Herzog gives us Nicolas Cage grinning, laughing, and apparently having a ball.

This has got to be one of Nicolas Cage’s wildest performances. He yells. He bulges his eyes. He grins maniacally at the strangest moments. He interrogates a suspect while taking hits off a joint. Because his character has a bad back, Cage moves stiffly, carrying himself almost as if he were a living Golem. McDonagh may have his demons but, at the same time, he also seems to be having a blast every time we see him. Wisely, Herzog also allows the character some quieter moments. When the lieutenant talks about how he used to imagine there was pirate treasure buried in his back yard or when he and an ex-con sit in front of a gigantic fish tank, Cage gets a chance to show that there actually is something going on underneath all of McDonagh’s bluster. This not only one of Cage’s most over the top performances but also one of his best.

Herzog not only gets the best out of Cage but also the best out of New Orleans. He may not make New Orleans look beautiful but he still captures the atmosphere that has made New Orleans one of the most legendary cities in the world. Cage, Herzog, and New Orleans make for a great combination.

The Things You Find On Netflix: Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s The Island of Dr. Moreau

Posted on August 20, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I have never actually seen the 1996 film The Island of Dr. Moreau but I certainly have read a lot about it.

It’s one of those films that seems to get mentioned whenever film critics start talking about the worst films of all time and, as a result, the story of the film’s production has become legendary. The film’s shoot was difficult, for reasons of both nature and human nature. The film was shot in the inhospitable Australian rain forest and shooting was briefly shut down due to a sudden hurricane. Richard Stanley, the original director, was unceremoniously fired by New Line Cinema and apparently proceeded to go native in the Australian wilderness, smoking a huge amount of weed while the studio executives feared that he would return and burn down the set. Veteran director John Frankenheimer was brought in to finish the film and clashed immediately with the film’s notoriously eccentric and difficult stars, Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando.

And I have to admit that, every time I read about The Island of Dr. Moreau, there’s a part of me that wants to track down and watch this film and see how bad it could possibly be. But, every time I find myself too tempted, I think about a shirtless Val Kilmer lounging around in a kilt and I quickly change my mind.

Bleh!

Fortunately, if I want to get a feel for the insanity behind the film’s production, I no longer have to actually watch The Island of Dr. Moreau. Instead, I can just get on Netflix and watch an entertaining documentary called Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s The Island of Dr. Moreau.

Lost Soul could have just as easily been called Everybody Hates Val Kilmer. Val himself declined to be interviewed for the documentary and I have to say that I think that was a huge mistake on his part because literally everyone who did agree to be interviewed appears to absolutely despise Val Kilmer. It’s not so much that everyone tells a story about Val’s bad behavior as much as the fact that, decades later, everyone still seems to be so traumatized by the experience of having been anywhere near him. (German actor Marco Hofschnieder especially seems to take a lot of delight in doing a devastating yet hilarious imitation of Val Kilmer smoking a cigarette and complaining about every line of dialogue, regardless of whether it was his dialogue or not.)

The documentary also includes plenty of crazy Marlon Brando stories but there’s a noticeable difference between the Brando stories and the Kilmer stories. Brando is portrayed as being an almost tragic figure, a great actor who hated his talent and, as a result, went out of his way to give performances that mocked the very idea of even trying to be good. As annoyed as everyone seems to have gotten with Brando, there’s still an undercurrent of affection to the Brando stories. That’s something that is definitely lacking from the Kilmer stories.

(According to the documentary, Brando was not a Val Kilmer fan. When Kilmer asked Brando if he had visited the Australian reef, Brando replied, “I own a reef,” and reportedly didn’t speak to Kilmer for the rest of the shoot.)

As interesting as the stories about Brando and Kilmer may be, the heart of the film rests with Richard Stanley, the promising young South African director whose brief “mainstream” film career was pretty much derailed by the drama surrounding The Island of Dr. Moreau. Interviewed at his home in France and captivating the audience with both his intense stare and his mordant sense of humor, Richard Stanley describes both his vision for The Island of Dr. Moreau and the pain of having that vision snatched away from him. Not only does he confirm that, as has long been rumored, he did sneak back onto the set as an extra but he also explains that the production’s problems were largely due to a mishap involving a warlock named Skip.

Lost Soul makes for an interesting cautionary tale about what happens when an artist has to deal with the establishment. Watch it with Jodorowsky’s Dune and have yourself a double feature of “what could have been” cinema.