Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  Oh . . . almost forgot. The girl that gets laid gets killed. The girl that doesn’t, doesn’t. But, of course, Craven, like every other horror film-maker who has presented this link between female adolescent sexuality and brutal punishment, wasn’t trying to push celibacy or abstinence, nor apply any right-wing or anti-feminist morality to his scary movies. Any resemblance to fundamentalist religious nutters, or anyone else who hates the idea of young women feeling free to do what they want with their bodies without guilt or fear, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This is perhaps the most notorious and curious anomaly of the teen slasher genre, and one that Craven defined here and in the movie that gleefully postmodernised his and every other teen slasher classic, Scream (see here). On the one hand, constant sadistic retribution visited on sexually active teen femmes. On the other . . . the monster always finally beaten by The Final Girl. Nowhere does this built-in contradiction play itself out more than A Nightmare. . . and especially in the scene where Freddy’s finger-knives appear between Nancy’s legs while she nods off in the bath. It’s scary and funny, but the viewpoint – we watch the scene as if we were right behind Freddy’s dangerous digits, poised for soapy cunnilingus – is point-of-view porn before anyone knew what that was.

  But perhaps the way to look at A Nightmare. . . – rather than competitors and inferiors – is to notice how huge a part childhood plays in the texture of the movie. From the recurring ‘Freddy’s Coming For You’ nursery rhyme, to the relentlessly sing-song nature of the soundtrack, to Mommy Thompson’s attempts to comfort Nancy with warm milk and toddler talk, to the way that the rooms where the most horrific deaths take place mock the sanctity of a child’s earliest private world . . . their bedroom. There is something here, in these dreams of experiences the victims aren’t ready to face, about mourning the loss of innocence involved in growing up.

  Craven had originally envisaged Fred Kruger as an abuser of children. He changed his mind after a series of high-profile child molestation cases in America just before filming began. But perhaps the connection between sex, cynicism and death in A Nightmare. . . would’ve have made more sense if his monster had been a paedophile – a man who had stolen the dreams and the innocence of children. There would also have been a little more emotional pull towards the movie’s suburbaphobic, anti-right-wing vigilante subtext, what with Fred’s somnambulist rampage having been set in motion by the townspeople killing him and keeping it as their own pre-David Lynch dark underbelly secret.

  A Nightmare On Elm Street is an average film in many ways. The acting is wooden, the dialogue dull. But none of that matters when Johnny Depp is sucked into a bed and spat out as a geyser of blood. It’s a movie about extraordinary special effects, a dark but childlike imagination, deft suspense-and-shock jolts, a wonderfully realised bad guy . . . and an unbeatable idea that makes the stuff of nightmares into the stuff of nightmares.

  Buffy nicked so much from this movie that it would be fair to call it the bastard daughter of A Nightmare On Elm Street and Heathers (see here) There’s no greater compliment I can give. Just don’t make me watch any of the Freddy sequels, because therein lies true horror.

  NIGHT OF THE COMET

  1984

  Starring: Catherine Mary Stewart, Robert Beltran, Kelli Maroney, Mary Woronov, Geoffrey Lewis

  Dir.: Thom Eberhardt

  Plot: The only camp post-apocalypse zombie teen feminist comedy sci-fi action thriller – made by film geeks, for film geeks.

  Key line: ‘Come on, Hector. The Mach-10 sub-machine gun was practically designed for housewives.’

  Before the comet changes everything, we are living in a world where teenage girls say to their slutty, cheating stepmothers, ‘You were born with an asshole, Doris. You don’t need Chuck’, and are rewarded with a right-hook that sends them flying, and it’s supposed to be funny. And sad. And is. So, as this movie suggests before anything apocalyptic happens . . . would the end of our world really be so terrible? Especially for kids?

  Thom Eberhardt’s second feature is one of those classic ’80s B-movies about B-movies. One of those movies where, when you see a special effect as awful as the bright red action painting that signals the apocalypse here, you have no idea whether it’s due to poverty, ineptitude or ironic homage to the awful special effects that delight us in the ’50s sci-fi B-pictures it’s so clearly in love with. A movie that jars, but in an entertaining and subversive way, by following, say, a beautifully composed shot of the eeriness of an entirely deserted Los Angeles with a woodenly unfunny one-liner, as if the maker can’t make up his mind whether he’s Orson Welles or Ed Wood. Because it is, at its roots, a film about films, it is liberally scattered with in-jokes for film buffs, like the vintage poster for Clark Gable and Jean Harlow’s Red Dust (the comet leaves the sky red and makes us into little piles of red dust), a look and cheesy rock songs stolen from Walter Hill’s The Warriors (see here), minimalist electronic incidental music filched from John Carpenter (see Halloween, p. 169), and entire swathes of its basic scenario from Zombiemeister George A. Romero (see Martin, here). The more nerdy you are about cult movies, the more you feel in on the joke, the more you realise that a movie that looks superficially dodgy is actually very, very good. At times Night Of The Comet has nothing more on its mind than playing a cheesy rock instrumental while watching a hot babe ride a motorbike. The gorgeous shots of a completely deserted city pre-date 28 Days Later. Its all-kicking, all-punching rock ’n’ roll teen heroines anticipate Buffy. And there’s only one gag-inducing dollop of splattery gore, so it’s fun for all the family.

  The planet is having a millennium-style street party because Earth is passing through the tail of a comet that last visited us 65 million years ago. No one has noticed that this is precisely the same 65 million years ago when all the dinosaurs disappeared – except the camp and portentous narrator at the beginning of the movie. Los Angeles teen queens Reggie (Stewart) and Samantha (Maroney) survive because both turned down an invite to nasty Stepmom’s party; gorgeous, pouting Reggie to have sex with her boyfriend in the projection room of the cinema where they both work, and chubby cheerleader little sis Sam to hide in a shed so she didn’t have to watch Stepmom making out with one of the neighbours while their soldier dad is away fighting for truth, justice and The American Way against commie Sandinistas in Honduras. See, Kids . . . disobeying your elders could actually save your life!

  Before either can get used to the death of everything, they are being attacked by flesh-eating zombies who are still being turned into red dust, but more slowly and hideously. When the sisters hear a music radio show, they head to the radio station to meet the DJ survivor. But there isn’t one. It’s just a tape (for some reason, the end of the world doesn’t stop the electricity working. Who knew?). There they meet Hector (Beltran), a hunky truck driver survivor who, being both hot and working class and therefore naturally decent, is just what a girl needs in a situation like this. Eventually, the trio must save cute defenceless children from a team of scientists who want to harvest the blood of survivors to create a serum that will cure the zombie-dust madness, but only for them, because only geniuses deserve to live.

  Scattered in among the scatty plot are the great little digressions that make a dumb action movie into a smart-dumb action movie. For example, there’s a poke at the LAPD when Sam has vivid nightmares about being eaten by zombies, but the zombies are always former cops in uniform. And no matter how much comic-book daftness is going on, Eberhardt never neglects the basic ingredients of classic teen angst.

  Take the lovely scene in the radio station bunker, where Reggie explains her distant soldier dad’s disappointment that she and Sam weren’t boys, and the chemical reaction between her and Hector begins to do its slow-burning thing. Hec needs to go back to his native San Diego to see if any of his nearest and dearest have survived. Reggie pleads with him not to go. The sincerity of actors and dialogue is sneakily undercut by the last-dance-at-the-disco lighting and the appa
llingly cheesy ballad playing on the radio. The scene switches to Sam, sitting alone, watching them, her face full of resentment, and fear, and resignation, and you can feel years of sibling rivalry, and boys that Sam liked only having eyes for her glam big sister. But she then scratches, distractedly, at her shoulder, and we realise that more than her heart might be crumbling to dust.

  The scene exemplifies the best of this wee gem of a movie: an uncanny ability to move from monster-movie spoof to coming-of-age tale, from comedy to pathos, from cheap thrills to resonant drama, neatly suggesting, as it does so, that even if the end of the world happened tomorrow, the few survivors would still keep humanity alive by needing, wanting and not getting exactly the same things they craved before the fall.

  The army brat back-story also provides deft ballast for the best action heroine moments. We’re soon watching Sam, a curly blonde midget in a cheerleader outfit that mocks her every move, handling a machine gun with laconic legs-akimbo aplomb, taking out a car with extreme prejudice. Joss Whedon has never mentioned Night Of The Comet among his acknowledgments of where his best Buffy ideas came from. But so much of Sam and Reggie survive in the character and look of Buffy Summers that it surely can’t be coincidence. Like Buffy, the pair are equally at home kung-fu kicking monster ass or discussing boy trouble, and have the tough-but-vulnerable Buffy ingredients to a tee, including the corny comic-book wisecracks.

  The best female bonding moment is also the most explicit nod to Romero’s zombie touchstone Dawn Of The Dead. Serenaded by a terrible cover version of ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’, Reggie and Sam play dress-up in a department store where everything is now at a permanent and very generous discount. Sadly, the store’s stock boys are now punk rock Bond-villain zombies who can talk, organise, move at normal human speed, handle automatic weapons, and like making arch super-villain announcements over the store intercom. The girls ain’t having fun for too long. Eberhardt can’t resist mocking Romero too. Dawn Of The Dead was famously hailed as a great satire on consumerism because the action was set in a shopping mall. Here, one of the mad scientists just goes right ahead and announces: ‘Here’s the closest shopping arcade. But the whole area’s an absolute monument to consumerism!’, thus putting smug critics like me out of work.

  Eberhardt also sets himself a little challenge whereby, if you hear a cheesy rock song commenting on the action, well, so do the characters themselves. So much so that, when one perilous action sequence comes to an end, the winning character yells, ‘Knock that shit off’ and one of his henchmen finally stops the dire shootout music by blowing a radio away with a shotgun.

  And a special word about former Warhol and Amazonian androgyne Mary Woronov, who plays tragically heroic scientist Dr Audrey White, and is one of my all-time fave under-rated screen presences. She is the kind of deliberately ‘bad’ acting genius who can let an entire viewing audience into a film-makers’ joke just by the way she pronounces the word ‘apparently’. Here, she gets her ‘And the parallel universe Oscar goes to . . .’ moment when she performs the sexiest suicide scene in movie history while wearing shades and a boiler suit.

  At the movie’s end, Reggie, Hec and the two sprogs they rescue have become a conveniently instant nuclear family. Sam watches them from across the street, contemplating a man-less future and noticing that the four ‘look like the Brady Bunch’. The traffic lights are, for some reason, still operational, and Reggie forbids the two children to cross until the proper moment. As Sam questions her sister’s sanity, a speeding car screeches around the corner, almost knocking her down. And Sam gets a cute, man-sized present that explains the apparently pointless opening scene involving Reggie, a video arcade game and the letters DMK.

  Apart from the agreeably goofy storyline, the wry satirical laughs and the sheer comic-book fun of Night Of The Comet, it also cleverly presents a teenager’s view of The End Of The World entirely at odds with the bleak vision of A Boy And His Dog’s misogynist madhouse (see here). Here, Armageddon is a parent-less anarchist playground where no one owns anything and there are no annoying authority figures to tell you what to do, or control your future. A running joke involves the characters kidding around about giving each other a football stadium or Texas, because there’s no military-industrial complex to ensure that anything belongs to anyone any more.

  There was no sequel, but in my imaginary 28 Weeks After The Comet, Reggie, Hec and family provide a non-hierarchical shelter for socialist survivors, while Sam quips away her around America, kicking zombie ass in a cheerleader’s outfit she never grows out of. Who says the apocalypse is a bad thing?

  RED DAWN

  1984

  Starring: Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, Lea Thompson, C. Thomas Howell, Jennifer Grey, Brad Savage, Harry Dean Stanton, Powers Boothe, Ben Johnson

  Dir.: John Milius

  Plot: The Brat Pack vs Communism.

  Key line(s): ‘Who’s on our side?’

  ‘Six hundred thousand screaming Chinamen.’

  ‘Last I heard there were a billion screaming Chinamen.’

  ‘There were.’

  The incredibly strange Red Dawn is a noisy, bad taste essay on resistance fighting. Why resistance is heroic. Who would resist, and why. The actual military details of how to resist a powerful occupying force. It has been compared, with some deliberate mischief, by a conservative writer or two, to the classic 1966 movie The Battle Of Algiers, a surgical study of Algerian guerrilla resistance against French occupation which remains a high-point of leftie cinema . . . and they have a point. It’s a popcorn-trash Battle Of Algiers. And it dares to suggest that, if your country is invaded by a totalitarian regime, the hope lies in The Kids.

  You’ve got to appreciate a movie that doesn’t fuck around. Red Dawn kicks off with four minutes that gives you all the context and back-story you need . . . and then gets right on with the killing. We have captions that explain the lead-up to World War III . . . the USA isolated by NATO, a failed Soviet wheat harvest, a revolution in Mexico, a Soviet invasion of Poland, the commie armies of Cuba and Nicaragua conquering El Salvador and Honduras. Most amusing of all, the Green Party taking control of the West German parliament and immediately getting rid of all nukes from European soil, because Europe is, as all Americans know, just one single pesky country with different weird accents. And it’s always the Germans’ fault.

  This all begins with a shot of The Rough Riders statue. The Rough Riders were a voluntary cavalry unit set up in 1898 to help Civil War-depleted troops fight the Spanish-American War. Their second-in-command was future President Theodore Roosevelt, and we are given a Roosevelt quote which could serve as a justification for the movie: ‘Far better it is to dare mighty things than to take rank with those poor, timid spirits who know neither victory nor defeat.’

  We see small-town America waking up on a sunny winter’s morning: a paper boy on his rounds, cute kids going to school, empty placid streets that are lent a romantic beauty by the kind of elegiac classical music that often sound-tracked a show like The West Wing: a music that oozes a kind of specifically American patriotic pride, offset by a sentimental paternalistic kindness. How America likes to see itself, I guess, when it isn’t attaching electrodes to the bollocks of ragheads in Guantanamo.

  It then continues with a classroom lecture from a black teacher about the brutal fighting methods of Genghis Khan’s Mongol army. He stops talking when he notices that paratroopers are landing on the school playing field, just a few yards away from the window. It is 4 minutes 30 seconds into this mental little movie, and the Soviet invasion of Colorado is already under way.

  This is where I sat up and took notice of Red Dawn. Like many a lefty, I didn’t see the film on release, and never went looking. The critics of 1984 hated this movie, and saw it as evil right-wing propaganda. It was released just as hatred of America was hardening over the militaristic excesses and covert anti-socialist actions of the Reagan administration. The 1983 invasion of Grenada. The 1986 ‘Contragate’ scandal,
in which the American military were selling arms to Iran in order to fund Nicaragua’s right-wing guerrilla forces. The covert war against Chile’s left-wing government. The ‘Star Wars’ initiative, Cruise missiles and the funding of anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan, some of whom went on to be Osama bin Laden. Red Dawn’s context for World War III reads like one long, chest-beating justification for American paranoia and the resulting abuses of its power. Add to this its with-a-bullet entry into The Guinness Book Of Records as the most violent film ever made (at the time) – 2.23 acts of violence per minute, apparently – and it sounded like Rambo as directed by Oliver North. Not a natural cinema choice for a Smiths fan from Brixton.

  So I watched it, for this book, for the first time a few months ago. And I was, for no want of a better phrase, blown away. And this scene, where, with the movie barely started, peril falls from the sky while kids sit in a classroom, blithely wondering about what’s for lunch and whether Betty Sue will let ’em get to second base this recess, got me on board. A Nightmare On Elm Street (see here) might do a pretty convincing job of manifesting the night terrors of the young, but I never had bad dreams about men with black hats and knives for fingers. I did – after learning about the Second World War, Belsen and Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki – have childhood nightmares about this: a faceless force, dropping into my world, destroying everything, irrational, unstoppable. I don’t think I was alone. Any random listen to pop records made between around 1977 and 1984 betrays a mass cultural fear of World War III. And frankly, when the oblivion begins, does it really matter who started it?