What have you watched recently? 3D!

Deep Rising (1998)

Sometimes you want a steak. Sometimes you want a burger. Yet sometimes, you just want a €2 piece of trash where you suspect the carcinogens just shortened your life by a couple of weeks - but you loved every bite.

Was this high art? Not remotely, but I couldn't deny the cathartic enjoyment derived from this oddball artefact of that brief period in Hollywood when Stephen Sommers seemed to be the man who could deliver; this then The Mummy movies suggested a talent for an alchemy of B Movie schlock and mainstream blockbuster aesthetics - as long as it was on a budget. Van Helsing's more generous chequebook was the crash to earth from which Sommers' career never recovered, all as the Blockbuster itself started moving on past the kind of cheesy swashbuckling thrills he created.

It feels pretty redundant to comment that the mid-budget, 1998 CGI hasn't aged well in the slightest - but like everything else in this film its brazen, unapologetic goofiness kinda charmed its way past my defences; while the constrained budget seemed to force a degree of Jaw-adjacent canniness of when and where to deploy the computer-generated tentacles. Plus, when a film believed even the rifles of the protagonists needed to be 'roided up into handheld mini-guns, you know this production understood the assignment to be as Big As Possible - all while wearing an endearingly stupid grin. The actors themselves got the notes too 'cos while the performances were uniformly broad, they were all committed; Treat Williams knew he was being asked to play Han Solo but never once seemed above it all - while his "Now what?" catchphrase succeeded more through charisma than on paper, including the laugh-inducing mic-drop final shot. Brendan Fraser leading The Mummy was a definite upgrade mind you.

All that praise aside, this was a premise and execution that sorely missed the presence of some prosthetics or animatronics to better sell the deaths and gorier moments: actors reacting stiffly to badly composited FX, or a blatantly CGI ragdoll being swallowed up, just couldn't match the visceral impact of an on-set effect; this was precisely the kind of film that needed a rubber tentacle or two chomping into the (surprisingly stacked) cast. It didn't have to be the level of The Thing, but something tangible & glistening that shared the frame with the actors.

The Bikeriders (2024)

One of these days Comer's gonna come up against an accent she can't nail - but today was not that day.

By all accounts slick & had the pulse of something authentic and lifted from its source photography, but ultimately it all rang a little disappointingly hollow from Jeff Nichols: the glib summary of it as some broad-strokes construction off the Goodfellas template was inescapable - voiceover n' all to the extent I nearly expected someone to say, "all my life I wanted to be a biker" - but the film lacked a certain connective narrative tissue resulting in a failure to either interrogate or illuminate a world likely alien to most watching. A disconnect so pronounced, I wondered if while Nichols himself was (over) enthused about this culture and point of history, and had eagerness overrode his priorities to translate it into something for the layman to appreciate, emotionally speaking? Goodfellas at least had a classic structural trope of the dangerous allure of the gangster life & flying too close to the criminal sun - that sense of a reckoning approaching with each decision taken ... but here? Sit me down and ask what I now understood of the biker culture & I'd struggle.

For sure Jodie Comer's performance was magnetic, Austin Butler's own possessed of some kind of old-school Hollywood alchemy, and even Tom Hardy's accent wasn't too distracting for once, showing good energy as this sad-sack, hulking bear; but nothing seemed to come together and by about the midway mark it all lost whatever momentum it had, ambling to a deeply unsatisfying conclusion. Rare enough films end & I genuinely find myself thinking, "oh, was that it?". Even internally within the thing, Hardy's character seemed unmoved while his own club of tough-guy cosplayers became suffocated by actual criminality and scumbags; nobody seemed to have any motivation or sense of agency. I've said it before but if the film didn't care too strongly about these things, why should I?

Like cosplay itself, the film's texture looked authentic and striking, but it was all as deep and tough as cardboard; all poses and affectation with no heart.

The Thing (1982)

You know, I reckon if it wasn't an alien, it might have just happened on its own: while you could legitimately argue this film's lacked any substantive depth in its characterisation - the cast identified more by appearance and broad-strokes physicality than anything emotional - you also got the sense that these individuals were already a hair's breadth from falling into division and/or violence without the catalyst of some grotesque organism invading their bodies. I  never once got the sense that Kurt Russell's Mac or Keith David's Childs ever liked each other, even before it all went a bit tentacular.

Now. I say "invading their bodies", but was it that The Thing absorbed their bodies instead? Did they know they were being taken over? Or was it some kind of clone pretending to be human? It was never remotely clear & remains one of the enduring qualities of this film: you were never quite sure about anything - not even the rules. And given how much the Horror genre loves its rules, this film's very structure defies convention.

And perhaps that casual disdain for the mechanics of the threat was because being so primally transgressive and vomitous to behold, it didn't matter. The viewer felt the key point: don't let it touch you - and don't trust the man next to you. Yet equally, this wasn't a structure so loose that a cursory investigation unraveled the entire internal logic either; the lightning in the bottle was no matter how many times you watched, there was always this unshakable kernel of uncertainty at the heart of it. Up to the point Rob Bottin deployed his macabre set-pieces it was never entirely clear at what point a character stopped being human; rarely clear when the switch happened or how. Yet equally, it never felt like the film was cheating you either. John Carpenter's opus was a picture suffocated top to bottom by a crystalised form of tired paranoid anxiety, and with a garnish of red herrings here & there made sure to externalise a degree of the paranoia onto the viewer itself. You're just never sure of anything - including that All Timer ending.

And to the gore, I've often wondered if that's the element that has perhaps curtailed any proper mainstream adoption of this as an important "canonical" work: no question 40+ years later and bar a little stiffness in the puppetry, the dripping, twisted befouling of the human and dog form still packed a punch that might easily cause nightmares; perhaps though that extremity of vision meant the film will forever remain more niche and less embraced in causal Best Of lists than it should. I respect how gore and body horror isn't for everyone.

Yet as perfect as the picture remained after this umpteenth watch, I couldn't resist snorting at some of the details on the margins: the largest being how Blair's computer - in the early '80s and the middle of the Arctic - had advanced software to calculate the probability of global infection by alien organisms? It was such an obvious bit of expositional lamp-shading that couldn't escape coming off clunky - and slightly redundant too given how viscerally immediate the threat was in the first place. We didn't need to deploy the whole "Computers are Magic" to establish the threat; the scene in the dog pen should have been more than adequate. Also: why would an Arctic base ever need flamethrowers? <so-the-movie-can-happen />

Might actually give the sequel-prequel another go: it's production problems are storied but I only gave it one go & maybe the intervening decade has been kind on the 2011 flick