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The Prestige (2006)
Interpretation of This Film -- *SPOILERS*
They weren't twin brothers. The Professor knew *exactly* the secret word to tell how to go get a copy of yourself made: "TESLA".
(1) This film is meant to illuminate the genius of overlooked scientist Nikola Tesla. The film does its best to present us with an extraordinary historical figure whose legacy, in terms of posterity's historical recollections, is less than extraordinary. Tesla cannot be relegated to a mere side-show figure for this film or for its interpretation. A fictitious figure could easily have taken the character-role.
(2) The film seeks to illuminate possible humanist qualities. It doesn't promote such qualities: the characters are too flawed. This is similar to the quantum mechanism of light -- is it a wave, or a particle? In one sense it exists at a captured moment in space, but in another it could be either real or unreal depending on the observer. That is what I mean by "illumination" of the subject matter. Both "illumination" and "illusion" share the same family of Latin roots.
(3) You are left with a verbal cliff-hanger. But the film gives no evidence there could be any more story.
At some point, the Professor went to Tesla for a teleport mechanism, leading to two possibilities: (A) Tesla and the Professor believe the teleport was unsuccessful. Later, The Professor meets his double outside, and they leave. Tesla is left none the wiser.
(B) Similar to (A) except the Professor and his clone return to show Tesla what occurred.
I suggest the latter. Tesla speaks gravely of the mechanism with Danton on the veranda. If Tesla didn't know that he was producing clones, he would have no reason to ward Danton away. This recurring theme of "getting your hands dirty" shows up here. If this was Tesla's own "maiden voyage" becoming acquainted with his machine, he would have no reason to be so reserved.
We don't see who burns down Tesla's shop. Tesla and his assistant climb into their carriage, apparently with a huge, malfunctioning device that had already been paid for. In an inferno, are they going to spend time dismantling a huge apparatus and packing it up? At this point in his life, Tesla was quite used to rebuilding things. I posit that Tesla and his assistant burned down their own shop.
The Professor only has one clone. In contrast, Danton unimaginatively lives out the flaw of the machine so that it becomes his own most tragic flaw. Recall the scene when he is half-drowning himself in the sink while trying to visualize what suffering his wife went through as she drowned in the ropes act, perhaps out of a lingering sense of guilt.
Danton's first instinct at seeing the copy of himself was to shoot himself. The lineage of memories is only kept on with the Danton who survives. One Danton experiences that death, the other does not. It is explicitly stated by Danton that he never knows which Danton will die.
Danton cared more about being in front of the audience than giving the audience any reason to applaud. He cared more about stealing his opponent's technique than about the memory of his own wife. It's enough to him that one "part" of him is going through his wife's torture, as long as the other "part" of him is basking in glory.
The Professor's wife is treated poorly and the mistress was treated off-handedly. Both of those women took a secondary role to performance. Considering each Professor had so much to gain by sticking with his own woman, the only one real reason to switching was to make it believable. The women could be left to hang and to run, as long as they didn't ruin the act.
Cutter himself is always in the dark. He doesn't know enough to make a moral decision, but he acts anyway. He gets one man killed while working for another man who gets 100 killed.
There is no actually presented moralistic ideal. The wife may have been innocent, and may have been conscientious, but she left behind a child and a man who (at least every other day) genuinely loved her. She's the moral maximum in this story, but a relative maximum at best.
At the end of the film, take stock: (i) One of the two Professors is dead.
(ii) The Danton who survived a slew of clonings is dead.
(iii) The remaining Professor has his daughter back.
The only possible continuation of the story would be that Danton decided to allow one of his clones to live. The movie presents no evidence of such. If we say "there is still be another Danton", then we're just making things up.
I would like to allude to the experimental hypothesis known as "Schroedinger's Cat". As soon as you open the box, you "collapse" the light's function to either a particle or a wave. Until that point, here is a mysterious existence wherein the cat is both alive and dead at the same time. The Professor is the one who opened the box and accepted fate for better or for worse.
The film is largely an allegory of the failures and the successes of quantum physics, and a toast to the magic and mystery of the designs and discoveries of Nikola Tesla. Those are its primary features. So things like morals also get tossed into Schroedinger's box. But morals are absolute things. We don't say that ambivalent morals are still moral. Morals are treated as valid only when they are absolute and guarded. A person with changing or ambiguous morals is said to act either ethically or unethically, but their morals are no longer validated. And even ethics are considered to be culturally relative.
The tease at the end with no further evidence is the film's send-off, its own lack of a "prestige", admission that the story is truly told in full.
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
One among many terrible, awful films you should really, really see.
Inglourious Basterds is just one of those really terrible, just G-dawful films that, frankly, you will probably really enjoy a heck of a lot and you should probably see just because it will actually make you feel good. If you like a terrible movie like "Shadowboxer" that just has to be seen, then see this one, too.
The acting is terrible, but the parts aren't meant for great actors. Amateurs could perform as intended.
The cinematography is surprising. Several scenes will seem familiar or cliché, and yet you'll notice an unconventional angle was chosen and appreciate that it was the best angle for that scene, or some unconventional pan that conveys perfectly the scene's direction and momentum. The camera and choreography were refreshing. It's a knee-jerk reaction these days that "the unconventional camera work was overdone, false ambition". That doesn't apply, here. Tarantino seems to use the camera to carve beautiful, curling lines through the cinema space.
The color scheme is based on the Nazi flag. It's cheaply and effortlessly presented, out front, that no shame was felt in being so obvious. That's a sense you get through the whole movie, a shrugging "so what" from the director, "I know, how cheap, just watch this next part". It's shameless and efficient, and the director's attitude justifies the title.
The movie is about the megalomania of war entertainment. How else to phrase that: "war-based entertainment" is superlative; "war movies" doesn't quite capture all of it; "glorification of war" is the impetus, not the form. The movie does actually present a message that "war is anything but glorious", but it is so quick and unapparent that it barely counts as the point of the movie. The rest of the movie is purely about glorifying war, on purpose. The movie's entire plot is about the use of the recording and recounting of war as a glorious pursuit for the sake of manipulating public consensus, or for the sake of turning a dollar, or for the sake of continuing a tradition, upbringing, or pastime. The ironies involve what you could say is a "film-maker's guilt": that inevitably, like all of modern technology, much of the advances in film we rely on today were made under the auspices of war propaganda, and that ultimately war propaganda is about instant gratification and megalomaniacal pursuits. The reason such propaganda and films in general are useful is because they are effective, effective because the film maker knows how to engage the audience, who are engaged because they relate so well they become immersed in the film to some extent. It becomes "realistic" to them as they watch it. This was not quite understood before World War Two; it is well understood, today, and perhaps was the entire expression of the "New Wave" in cinema. Today we have immersive, interactive environments where a person can fulfill their megalomaniacal desires and destroy hundreds of simulated human targets in a short period of time; this is called "realistic", "battle simulator", and so on, and not just by way of marketing. "Inglourious Basterds" symbolises the advent of the wholesale destruction of human lives as a pair of characters, one representing the half that is the real mechanism of war, and the other representing the portrayal of that for whatever purpose -- entertainment, propaganda and disinformation, training and briefing, conditioning, pre-conditioning, conditioned response sublimation, post-hypnotic immersive deprogramming, career choice, and so on.
All of that aside, the movie addresses the issue of racial stereotyping being bolstered by cinema. Obviously, people form stereotypes primarily based on direct experience and to a lesser extent information from others. In a state such as that, a person can be expected to have their stereotypes removed by further experience, or to have them reinforced by the same. Granted, you can use film as that form of "information from others" to lend suggestions of stereotypes to someone, but they may be just as easily rejected by the audience. Now, consider a film industry that is notoriously typecasting, where you only see people of certain "racial" heritage in certain roles. Russians, Slavs, and African descendants all complain of this occurring overmuch in Hollywood. The movie doesn't appear to address the issue of how Russians and Slavs are typecast as mobsters, vampires, bad guys, and so on, but it at least addresses the problems that African-Americans have faced historically in the film industry, in as quickly, directly, and obviously as it addresses "war isn't glorious". A person who is being informed by film is going to have a source of information that not only tries to present stereotypes, it tries to ensure that those stereotypes appear to be true in the world as far as film allows the world to be presented. "Slavs are all Dracula? Thanks, Hollywood! Blacks all have to die right away or they're going to escape and tear up the Empire? Thanks, Hollywood! Russians are all American-hating mobsters? Thanks, Hollywood!" Obviously such stereotypes are not true in the real world, but try and admonish Hollywood about it and get them to stop making that impression. Tarantino gives just that a shot.
Tarantino also expresses what I would say is probably a profound dislike for Nazis in general, and I would guess probably by way of the fundamentals they tried to stand for. If anything, you can say the movie is Tarantino's self-validation of his morals. "I'm a good person -- look what my fantasies are." Besides all of the artsy "message" content, or "what this means about the director" and so on, it's just a terrible comedy. I can't even say it's "action" -- there are all of two action scenes, and one is barely "action". The rest is just a bunch of violence. It's a bloody, gory, horrifying comedy.
The Prisoner (2009)
What do you expect for the NOW generation?
Review of "The Prisoner (2009)" When I first saw the ads for The Prisoner (2009), I was by turns excited, appalled, and curious.
The excitement because a couple of months earlier I'd seen The Prisoner (original series) for the first time thanks to my library's DVD collection. I thought it was amazing. Finally I understood what those time-honored sound-bite phrases ("I am the new number two"; "I am not a number, I am a free man!") meant. And finally I had found a "revolution" era product that combined every contemporary sense of the word (psychedelic, sexual, political, and so on) in a balanced perspective.
Then I was appalled as I realized that, in our dumbed-down, apathetic, anti-revolutionary, anti-social form of modern culture, there wasn't any chance that a remake would manage to be anything more than expensively, cinema-graphically splendid.
Though I was curious to see how it would turn out. I have to say, after watching the first two nights, I'm all the more curious: how will it turn out that the creators manage to complement the original's unabashed and unflagging humor? The remake seems jubilant at times (especially in the third hour's sub-rosa romp a la Monkees) but always in a purely dark, even satirical humor.
Frankly, I don't believe this remake could have fit a political campaign based on free pot. Nor do I believe there are enough valid and successful, social and political movements these days to warrant the same level of revolutionary frenzy originally celebrated.
The popular ideal of the future in the teen group has come full-circle, from "the dawning of the age of Aquarius" and hope in an evolutionary promise, to "2012". The original "Prisoner" series was, in a word, long. The current incarnation, as I am disappointed to discover at the second night's conclusion, is only enough for three nights' viewing. Why even attempt it? "The Prisoner (2009)" exemplifies what's worst in modern film in regards to the ethics of remaking: the belief that the original is some stalwart artifact to be trampled upon and sullied, shown-up, absently condensed and reduced, pulled and pinched into a rictured grotesque of how the modern mainstream feels when compared to their predecessors of that age; the belief that if there is still any interest in anything that old and comparatively obscure, the best way to capitalize on it would be to snuff it out and free up these attention centers for something more in line with the modern mainstream.
In that respect, the remake is, to its credit, more referential to the original than self-referential, a welcome convenience amidst today's instantly-packaged, mega-fame phenomena, and television with its mass marketed characters that are only funny because they only ever address the imaginary worlds they live in.
But, honestly, the concept -- that the breadth and depth of the original "Prisoner" could be reduced in an effective product (far from effective, I'd say the remake in its current encapsulation is doomed to be as forgotten by next year as the Oliver Stone miniseries "Wild Palms" that it more closely resembles than its namesake) -- should have been repeated out loud a few times, by the creators, in front of a mirror, so that it could have dawned on them that if it's such a dingy old thing to call for so much trimming-up, and such relaxed retelling, then maybe it's not worth dredging up again at all. It is appreciable as homage to the original but only to those who really enjoy watching the really sad part in "Old Yeller" for what it is; and the original "Prisoner" does not, in any way, deserve to be sent to the glue factory.
Despite all the social inquiries fielded by the original, I don't recall that the stigma of alternative sexual orientation was ever given address. The remake's third hour touches on the topic confidently and honestly. I must say that it is a refreshingly mature artistic representation we witness play out between two villagers through the detached, split observation of both Caviezel's and McKenna's characters. The emotional exchange is raw and stunning in execution, though muted or even washed out in presentation and form. The sudden introduction and abrupt ending of the subject is the first time the series manages to invoke the crazy-quilt episodic shtick of the original. Going without sensing this, I believe the viewer will be left to see much of the third hour as a waste of film.
But, having the proper perspective granted by a decent aesthetic grip on the original, one can see the third hour as perhaps a nod to all the original's celebrated movements in how instrumental they must have been to the gay-rights movement that would come a decade later. So saying, a person who is not familiar with the original would observe that the gay-rights movement is far too wildly successful today to warrant such a specific soapbox message, hence a waste of remake film. Conversely, though, seeing the third hour's gay message as a "lost episode" of the original, while validating the hour's value to film, raises the question of whether or not the film fails to avoid alienating heterosexual audiences by suddenly becoming so thoroughly immersed in homosexual politics. In that sense, it's possible that the third hour's late and bloodsoaked climax is at once apologetic to straight audiences, campy for the gays (by one interpretation of "backstabbing"), and disillusioning for all those viewers who speculated that this remake was going to be anything but brilliantly fast and dirty.
The fourth hour's theme (whether or not love is more than a chemical influence) is probably just as lost on today's PSA-inflicted culture as it would be on the original's audience for whom the word "love" was less likely to summon thoughts of equation than of merely "freedom". That said, the remake's true saving grace is a definitely and obviously intentional failure to be anything resembling "hip".
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)
Watch for Mini-Marlon, Buckethead, and Val's Brando!
I didn't know what to expect, as I sat down and started watching a VHS of this with some friends several minutes into the movie.
At first I thought it was a movie about how a spoiled-rotten Englishman might learn a thing or two about life from a swarthy, island-hopping character played by Val Kilmer. The Englishman goes on about how cute a rabbit is, so Kilmer snaps its neck in his face, that sort of thing. That's right about where I started watching. For a few moments I thought Kilmer was going to preach about the desolation the seemingly innocent rabbit can bring to a beautiful island if its population goes unchecked, but then he broke its neck (and I never figured out why).
Then I thought it was going to be a movie about teaching the spoiled Englishman how to loosen up and have a good time, when Kilmer allows him to discover the belly-dancing girl. A lot goes wrong; the Englishman exotifies the woman and alienates her at every step, and I kept thinking she was trying to seduce him to get close enough to smack him around or hurt him for being so inhuman in such a rottenly subtle way. Instead, she sees Kilmer watching from nearby and runs off. I thought Kilmer said something to the extent of bringing her some pudding upstairs, and my impression was that the Englishman was able to make himself comfortable with the thought of her as a toy, but still having no idea why he was on the island with Kilmer.
Then the Englishman wakes up in some kind of jail, and running around discovers -- almost as if he was directed to -- a little zoo inside the mansion on the island. And then as he's walking around the little zoo, he discovers there are doctors taking a screaming, bloody, animatronic baby out of pregnant woman wearing a pigface out of Kubrick's "The Shining". Then he freaks out and runs around. The scene of him running or falling into a zoo happens again, later, and my impression was that the Englishman was receiving some sort of moral lesson for having not helped some small monkeys free another small monkey from a cage, on an island where obviously you're supposed to do something humane to balance out all of the things that make English people uncomfortable.
Instead of learning to be less spoiled and learning to enjoy and share the company of the strange animal-people, the Englishman decides to always freak out and alienate and threaten everybody around him. When he gets his hands on a gun, it's really the pivotal point of the movie. At the perfect moment for the Englishman to say "oh, I didn't know you were all buddy-buddies living under the careful watch of a fat man pretending to be the Empress of China," instead he waves the gun at all the animals and starts a power-imbalance that eventually unravels the island's entire social structure.
Eventually there is a trial where a monster who particularly scared the Englshman is used as a scapegoat for the Englishman's crime of failing to help the boatload of little monkeys release their fellow little monkey from its cage. The Englishman's lawyer tries to defend him by stating that nobody is allowed to escape, but not until after he persecutes him by stating that nobody's supposed to act out violently. So, the scapegoat is given the opportunity to show how fierce of an animal he is towards the fat transvestite, who shoots him. The post-trial atmosphere is that the scapegoating has bought the alienating, rude, obnoxious Englishman some more time to live and think about what he's done, but that soon he's going to have to pay the price for his violence; that, or attempt to break the law of never escaping, and get killed in the process.
Then something totally unexpected happens, one of the animal-people sniffs around the burned remains of the scapegoat and pulls a bone out and appears to be ready to eat a piece of charred flesh when instead he stabs his fingernails into his guts and pulls out some kind of little black box. Evidently this frees him from the island's mind-control network, and from then out the movie makes little sense.
Despite not making sense, the movie has three great scenes later on: 1. the fat transvestite playing a baby-grand piano, with a small version of himself sitting on top of that piano and playing his own, smaller version of a grand piano. Then, there's a scene where the alienated girl pours stuff into an inverted bucket on the transvestite's head, and he scolds her for making it too strong. Then he convinces her that being like him isn't so great because his behaviour is so strange. The best scene in the whole movie is when Kilmer dresses up in enough clothing to cover his form and sits down dictating in the voice of Marlon Brando. He sounds just like Brando in "Apocalypse Now" when he was talking into his recorder in the jungle. Then he turns around and because his form is so hidden he looks like the little guy from the piano scene. So it came across like the little guy was pretending to be the transvestite in the transvestite's absence. It was so ridiculous that even the Englishman ran out of the scene screaming laughter.
That's what the movie was about.
Altered States (1980)
Could have been more hallucinagenic and more real.
*** SPOILERS ***
Many viewers have objected to this plot's lack of scientific realism. In a movie that not only stirs up but literally bathes in religious, cosmic, and psychedelic elements, scientific realism is an oxymoron. I would strongly suggest that people who enjoy this movie also see "Serpent and the Rainbow", "Flatliners", "Brainstorm", and "Wild Palms". All involve mind-altering experiments with religious connotations.
The Jessup character begins by using sensory deprivation to drive probably drug-influenced hallucinagenic experiences up the psychic wall. Jessup's experiments move onto a group-hallucinatory experience with some native Mexicans over mushrooms. That this was foreshadowed to be a group hallucination seems to have been missed by every reviewer and from this point most reviews lose all relevance to the film. You have to keep in mind that if what the native told Jessup is true, then Jessup was not alone in the imagery of his Mexican trip. If you don't believe that the native knew what he was talking about, then you might as well excuse the rest of the movie as nothing but an internal psychotic episode being experienced by a man dreaming while suspended in the waters of a sensory deprivation tank. I mean, if you are going to excuse the experience, then just push the eject switch while the titles are rolling because that's the entire experience. That's all there is. Otherwise, accept some of what occurs as reality. If you accept it as reality, then you might as well ditch the entire hallucinatory theory because you can't have it both ways. Either the experience is a hallucination or it is real. Do you dig what I'm saying? That's the difference between criticising this film as art placed on a medium and criticising it as a human story. It's either one or the other. There's no in-between or mincing. You would have to have arrived at an irrational conclusion to assume you can criticise it sometimes one way and sometimes the other, because there is just one movie in question and not any more movies than that. It's one, single movie based on one, single assumption which is either hallucinatory or real.
What Jessup experiences is the result not of substances or of environments but of his own mind. If you threw a steaming pottery-full of the Mexican mushroom mixture into the sensory-deprivation tank and hit puree, you still wouldn't get anything. Obviously the contagious element of the emergent experience, the active ingredient of the psychic phenomenon that doubles as real and hallucinatory is the human mind, Jessup's mind.
The religious symbolism is fascinating to the character, not only the christian bibilical symbolism but also the ancient mysticism as well. I found influences from biblical Revelation peculiar, while the emission of perhaps primordial or divine light through solid substances and the instantaneous malleation of elements and cellular anatomy struck me as quite profound. The repeating spectre that replaces Jessup at several points late in the film is unnerving. That twisted entity's aggravation is experienced by the viewer who relates that there is very little such an entity's actions can achieve toward relieving anxiety.
Nothing is missing from the film in terms of complete knowledge and understanding of fundamentals and extremes, especially in the realms of human behaviour and psychic externalism. Not once does the dramatic bow to the pretentious in this acting. I have to admit I allow myself one single artistic criticism; the first escaped regression scene featuring some acrobatics almost gave the movie a Broadway-to-film feeling. I can only imagine how a film like this would present itself on Broadway. Is that just hooting and screaming, or does the primate burst into song?
And is that a banana in my pocket, or are some of the experiences of the character generously nice of the provider? What I wanted to know was why the movie didn't explore the potential of mixing the primitive regression with the sexual discovery, and why the comingling of this discovery with the regression was stalled until the more cosmic regression takes place? And at that point, why didn't the cosmically regressed Jessup attempt to consume his wife more thoroughly, perhaps through a black hole? Wouldn't she have been just as desireable to his more profound self? And that is probably the single impetus that drives the entire film: the man just doesn't want the woman all that bad, until he realizes he might lose her essential manifestation to the external void.
Something this movie lacked was manifestation of even earlier fundamental forces embodied in human conciousness. Obviously this is hinted at in the busting of the sleep-deprivation vessel by the light shining out of Jessup, and the visual allusion to some kind of galactic birth, but neither Eddie, Arthur, nor even Mason prove to be Adam. Otherwise, the mentioning of various disciplines of cosmic creation (including 'mumbo jumbo', which I personally adhere to,) makes up for the lack of serious attempts to visualize the human snake eating its tail.
The City of the Dead (1960)
The Plot is Rooted in the Ritual
*** SPOILERS ***
'Horror Hotel' or 'The City of the Dead' stars two very pretty young women as the hapless victims of an ancient ritual. The handsome young men in one's life end up profoundly affecting the other's. One tries to sacrifice her life to perpetuate his own; one sacrifices his life to save hers; and the other struggles as a scientist to come to grips with the real supernatural powers of Satanic Devil-worship Witchcraft.
The film, overall, is a real gem. Minimal special effects all of fire and fog. Minimal acting, each delivery dead-on. Minimal scenery that creates voids on its own. Minimal accompaniment of instrumental score and song.
The dialogue is muted and frank. Rather than the plot being driven by the dialogue, the dialogue operates well as character-delivered narration to the story. The story occurs as a series of events, like an historical recounting. What the characters say would actually matter little considering the compelling, almost inevitable force that seems to manifest each next event after the last.
The events center around a small, old town in New England. The only impetus to the events themselves, offering any explanation as to their occurance, is the beginning. A woman, allegedly a wicce, is burned alive by angered puritanes. Between then and the end, there is no real explanation for why events happen or even why people make the decisions that they do. In retrospect the events have no pathological reason. And yet there is something else, something that makes each event seem obvious once you see it, leading you to say 'but of course that was going to happen, I saw that coming,' but did you really? I could say the movie completely lacks suspense and this would be true, but at the same time I must admit the first time I watched it I had no idea what was going to happen next. Only after I saw it did it seem obvious, and I had to fight the constant feeling that it was 'cheesy' and 'predictable'.
It isn't cheesy, yet it isn't suspenseful, either. The 'something else' that keeps this story mysterious and strange, even powerful, is the dark ritualism that makes up the central plot. That lack of knowing what will happen next, balanced with that familiarity after each event occurs, is all rooted in the ritualism. It's the lack of understanding the ritual that veils the events to come, and it is after the ritual occurs that the events regain so much familiarity.
What lends the situations a horrific weight at all is that they could actually possibly happen, something emphasized by the Professor's monologue immediately following the burning of the wicce. The movie is based on real events well documented in early American history. This 'fairy tale' is well rooted in reality, and the actions of the puritans in New England during the wicce-trial hysteria were rooted in fairy-tales.
One of the best effects in the film, used at least twice, is a simple cut-to revealing that somebody has disappeared. A similar effect is used when one young girl, who spends a leisurely amount of time in front of the camera in her lacy lingerie dressing her perky form into a silk blouse, steps through a doorway into an empty room. The effect is reinforced by a sexy, swinging jazz tune that the actress even bounces to as she approaches the doorway. The music suddenly stops, and we see her bounce right into an empty room. The effect? We were entirely expecting to see people there.
The ritualism that follows makes up the rest of the film, and the recurrance of peoples' lives is overshadowed by the ritualism that is actually driving everything. And rather than this joyride of Satanic Devil-worship Witchcraft power being grounded to a halt in reality, it is instead in turn overshadowed by the ritual symbolism of its opponent religious father, Christianity.
In a final bout between supernatural powers, the snake eats its own tail as the snide bully becomes the willing scapegoat and destroyes the defilers by inverting their molecules and setting them on fire achieved by blocking their forms from the light of the sun being reflected in the moon. It's really dramatic and on a rating scale with the burning car-crash at the bottom and the immense volume and density of fog at the top, the dark robes catching on fire amidst howls of pain falls right in the balanced middle. The best part of the whole movie occurs at this point, as the second pretty young girl to be sacrificed lays pinned to the altar by strangers' hands, screaming and begging urgently for "Dick!"
On my personal scale I use for rating such pleasurable horror films, I give this one Four out of Four Gory Splats!
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
Another Great Abandoning
(* Spoilers Ahead *) In Mad Max, a single police department with a few highway cops and patrolmen maintain civil order in a desolated region of Australia, apparently post-nuclear apocalypse. "Max" ends up losing absolutely everything civilized in his life -- everything. Not a drop of heart's blood is spared "Max" as he rips himself apart, trying to free himself of the chains and bonds of civilization in order to take revenge on the men who stole his world away. When it's all done, he wanders away from absolutely everything.
Mel Gibson's "Max" character returns in "Road Warrior", where the remnant of civilization has been left behind in favor of complete anarchy in the middle of the desert where an oil well refinery is the strongly-defended holdout of some kind of corporate collective, against growing bands of interested investors who would like to trade bullets and lives for the thinning lifeblood of petroleum. The leader of the wackos is absolutely cartoonish, sort of a psychotic pro-wrestler genius, while the leader of the recluses is dripping with ignorance and a desperate need to maintain his egotism. Every single person knows why they are in that desert, fighting -- because they can't get away from the the vehicles and the combustion. It's everything in their life. The distance between meals and drinks is dozens of miles. The distance to the nearest "real" civilization is not even survivable. Those who hold the vehicles hold the supreme power. "Max" delivers the oil-barons into salvation, but at a heavy loss, then once again wanders away from all that has come to pass.
Finally "Max", come into his own with a well-outfitted gravy train, is wandering the desert apparently finally convinced that he is the beacon of civilization, not some building or crowd. His delusion is sorely broken right at the beginning of the movie, and with nothing but his boots and a flute he's forced to rejoin humanity, but why we aren't exactly sure. He's been through it before and he knows what will happen, but still he saunters into "Bartertown" where he meets the sexy "Auntie Entity" (Tina Turner) who rules with elegance and ferocity, and agrees to scratch her back if she'll rub his.
Tina Turner's delivery as "Aunty Entity" is passionate. When she is stood off by the uppity "Master-Blaster", you can hear the hurt pride in her voice as she admits her humility. And when the real loser of Thunderdome is swiftly decided, you can see the fear in her eyes as everything, all the orders of civility she has cherished and sacrificed who knows what for, falls apart right under her hands. As the chaos grows, she looks above for guidance but sees only the mindless crowd, just as desperate as she and even more powerless. Her delivery from the middle of thunderdome is moving, but short compared to the brotherly storytelling of the very artful "Dr. Dealgood" (Edwin Hodgeman.) Nevertheless, what small part Turner is given to play is played from the bottom of her heart and you are thoroughly convinced that she is who she portrays. Her chain-mail suit could have been a little more transparent, though. The rest of the characters in "Bartertown", some recognizable from the earlier films, are real in a faery-tale sort of way that seems to follow naturally behind the previous films: in "Mad Max", the characters' selves were all dying like lights on their way to burning out; in "Road Warrior", their selves were completely gone, wasted with nothing but animal behaviors left; in "Thunderdome"'s "Bartertown", the desolation of the human inner being has proved to be merely a loss of luxury and comfort, and we see that deep inside these layers of modern dross most man and women really are larger than life, in their hopes and dreams and their achievements. "Max", unable to abandon life on his own this time around, is forced out into the desert wilderness to die.
We soon see the inherent human worth proved again in "Thunderdome"'s "Crack in the Earth", where little people, who never grew up with the bleak realities of technology and its apocalyptic inevitabilities as anything but faery-tales, are all as large of life as nature can provide for. The gorgeous "Suzannah" (Helen Buday, rhymes with boo tay,) drags "Max" back into life in a veritable Garden of Eden where children and children's' children, who are absolutely hysterical, spend every day of their lives in summer-camp dreamland. Finally, "Max" chooses not to abandon but to stay around and support -- whether because he's too tired to fight any more, or because he's learned to see a good thing when he's got it and not drop it for something better, it's hard to say -- maybe this is where he was on his way to in the first place. And yet none of this matters. Somehow, once again, humanity goes wrong over the same superstitions and arrogance as before, and a schism in the valley dwellers leads to calamity and a reconciliation with the recent past. "Max" decides to abandon the valley after all, proving finally that he really, truly is "MAD", sacrificing everything to return one more time to the truth that he and every man carries his best civilization with him wherever he goes.