Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  Scream is dominated by this kind of dialogue, which isn’t just designed to make you laugh knowingly at the lazy formulas of post-Halloween horror movies, but at the very notion that real-life killers are informed by screen killers. Key examples include: ‘There’s a formula to it! A very simple formula! Everybody’s a suspect!’; ‘Oh please don’t kill me, Mr Ghostface. I wanna be in the sequel’, and ‘If it gets too complicated you lose your target audience’. The in-jokiness spreads to cameos, whereby The Exorcist’s Linda Blair plays a reporter and Craven himself gets to be a school janitor who looks exactly like his most famous creation, Freddie Kruger. This all reaches some kind of ultimate moment of meta-movie mindfuckery in Scream’s most referenced and pastiched scene, The Rules.

  The teens are having a party. This is where Randy (Kennedy) runs through the basic formula of every teen slasher movie, while the party watches Halloween, and while the very things he’s mentioning are simultaneously happening in the movie. No. 1 – You can never have sex. 2 – You can never drink or do drugs. 3 – And never, ever, under any circumstances say, ‘I’ll be right back.’

  We then cut to bitchy TV news reporter Gale Weathers (Cox) and cameraman Kenny watching a film of the same scene on a TV in their van. ‘Boring,’ she sneers. This really is the most smartarse and self-deprecating meta-movie ever made, no competition.

  The ending is a scream. Crazed killers Stu (the wonderful Lillard) and Billy (Ulrich, primarily chosen for his startling resemblance to Johnny Depp in . . . Elm Street, if Depp had spent three years in a psych ward that included ‘make hair unfeasibly greasy’ in its list of treatments) manically stabbing each other (they’re attempting to frame Neve Campbell’s Final Girl heroine Sid’s Dad, and this so doesn’t matter) and riffing on the subject of movies as research for murderers before Stu reveals his motive as ‘peer pressure’ and is killed by a television falling on his head, in true cartoon style.

  In terms of reviving the horror genre, I suspect Scream’s impact lies more in what it destroyed rather than what it invented. Formula teen slashers were almost a done deal, unless you were Kevin Williamson and came up with concepts as fiendish as Final Destination (see here). Film-makers who took horror seriously reacted against Scream’s glossy cynicism and came up with the shaky cameras and invisible, supernatural monsters of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, freaking us out completely by introducing neo-realism to an unrealistic genre. The flipside is the kind of sadistic gore-fest represented by Saw, Hostel and The Human Centipede, fake snuff movies without art, drama or point. Craven and Williamson have their part to play in this, having soaked Scream in so much glib irony.

  And somewhere in the middle are the movies that ignored Scream, an extraordinary run of shockers from Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong that use a universal male fear of adolescent female sexuality as their fuel.

  But you know what? Ring isn’t in this book because it’s nowhere near as entertaining as Scream. It’s too silly to be scary but refuses to own up to it. I’m as jaded and desensitised by real-life horrors on TV as the next citizen of the Western world, and Scream makes me laugh at that inconvenient truth. But, at the same time, in that opening scene, it lets me know that I’m not so desensitised that watching Drew Barrymore get stalked and lynched doesn’t hurt. It’s the cleverest trick of a very clever film.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S ROMEO + JULIET

  1996

  Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes, Brian Dennehy, Paul Sorvino, Harold Perrineau, Paul Rudd, John Leguizamo, Christina Pickles, Pete Postlethwaite, Miriam Margoyles, Dash Mihok

  Dir.: Baz Luhrmann

  Plot: A timeless tale of doomed young lovers, guns and fish.

  Key line: ‘Do I have to do everything around here?’

  At last. A film where I don’t have to decide whether a plot rundown is necessary.

  Theoretically, Baz Luhrmann’s brash gang warfare modernisation of Romeo And Juliet should be a Marmite movie. Yet no one I’ve ever spoken to about the flick has either trumpeted it as the greatest thing ever, nor despised it with a purist’s passion. Perhaps that’s because, if you’d seen a trailer, you knew exactly what you’d be getting before you’d taken your seat: Shakespeare in the style of MTV. And if you were up for that disgustingly yoof-demographic-friendly idea, then Luhrmann delivered all the way, from the narrations delivered as news reports and gossip TV, to the guns and gangs and cool macho posing, the loud pop, rock and hip hop, the low attention span crash edit frenzy and action movie cliche´s, the riotous explosion of bright colours, the karaoke musical interludes, the very modern beauty of the two leads. It was exactly what it said on the pitch, with big brass buckles and enough gleaming weaponry to give Tarantino fans sloppy wet dreams.

  Thing is, that should have been rubbish. But it isn’t. It’s thrilling.

  This is the one movie in the book that I really wish I could see through a 1996 teenager’s eyes. A 15-year-old, perhaps, who had ignored Shakespeare at school because it seemed boring or irrelevant or too difficult. Knew Romeo And Juliet was about love but didn’t know the actual story. Went because there was nothing else to do, or because his/her mates were going, or because DiCaprio was in it. I’m going to assume they liked it, because over $147 million worldwide, not counting home DVD sales, is the box office result of healthy teen word-of-mouth. But what did this teen want more of afterwards? MTV? Gangster movies? Leo DiCaprio? Or did they decide they really had to read some Shakespeare, try to understand the language, maybe even go see a play at the theatre? Did Luhrmann convert hitherto uninterested kids to the delights of The Bard? I think that’s what Luhrmann was trying to achieve, but it’s impossible to accurately measure how well he pulled it off.

  There are two big reasons why WSR+J (I know – but one must think of the trees) works. The biggest is the cast. It really doesn’t matter how many explosions, guys doing that slow-motion firing-two-guns-while-flying-through-the-air thingy or drag act song ’n’ dance routines you shovel into Shakespeare by the spade-load: if you decide to ignore the West Side Story route and keep the original text, then the actors have to make someone who doesn’t know the language understand exactly what’s happening, and feel it in the gut. This cast do, every plot point and tragic inevitability, and particularly Dennehy, Margoyles, Postlethwaite and the thrillingly physical Leguizamo as Tybalt and former Oz star Perrineau as Mercutio, who kinda blow everyone off the screen whenever that unalterable screenplay gives them the chance.

  The other reason? The fish tank scene, of course! This is not only one of the most perfectly realised evocations of love-at-first-sight ever put onscreen; it’s also the one and only time I’ve ever been able to see the actual point of Leonardo DiCaprio. I mean, don’t get me wrong. He’s a surprisingly good Romeo . . . as long as you put your fingers in your ears every time he speaks.

  But in the fish tank scene he doesn’t have to talk, so good on yer, Baz.

  So . . . our star-cross’d lovers are at the big party but haven’t met, and Des’ree has just started singing ‘Kissing You’, the movie’s very own love theme. Romeo has stepped away for some quiet time and finds himself in this grand room with a big old tank full of brightly coloured tropical fish. The song is still pelting out full volume and Leo’s having a gander at the fish. But suddenly, through a hole in one of those watery bushes . . . a human eye. It moves quickly. Romeo starts, and stands up straight. And he looks at something . . . and then we switch to Claire Danes as Juliet, who is on the other side of the tank. And . . . we get the look.

  It’s a look that makes you wonder what this magic we call screen acting is really made of. All she’s doing, in essence, is opening her eyes widely and pursing her lips a little. But that really, really isn’t it at all. In this look, you get shock, awe, curiosity, vulnerability, lust, and some other less easily contained emotion which I can only describe as an understanding that her life will never again be the same, and that this probably isn’t a good thing. All the time, these b
eautiful fish are swimming in front of her, trying to attract your attention with their other-worldly colour schemes, but all you want is for them to get out the damn way so you can see that fathomless look again.

  We suddenly switch to DiCaprio. And bless me cotton knickers if he isn’t matching Ms Danes all the way. In the scenes up to now, the guy has looked maybe 17 years old (he was 21 at the time). But very suddenly, the boy looks 10 years old. It’s as if everything he’s experienced over the recent past has been sucked out of him, and he’s been taken back to the exact second before he had his first sex fantasy. It’s a look of . . . bewildered innocence, as if looking at the world, properly, for the first time. Then he suddenly raises both eyebrows with a slight smile, as if to say, ‘Ha! Blimey. What the fuck was that?’

  And then we get a little cutting between the two, and the song asserts itself, and the dance begins. It’s an unusual sort of dance, because the partners are separated by several feet of water and two panes of glass. They are dancing with the camera as it circles warily around them, conscious of eavesdropping on such a perfect moment. The reflections of the pair in the glass distort their faces from certain angles, and they play a kind of peek-a-boo of mutual discovery. At one point, Di Caprio looks as if he’s staring at a smiling mermaid with a giant face, and then the camera moves into the tank (NO! BRING THEM BACK!) and then we see Danes clearly, and DiCaprio as the mermaid. Danes’s delighted smile is now just such a beacon of pure joy that you begin to tear up. This is what love-at-first-sight should be . . . no . . . this is what love, full-stop, should always be. It should just stay . . .

  ‘Madam!’ Miriam Margoyles’s Nurse interrupts. Juliet must run. And she does . . . but with one last teasing smile back . . . an acknowledgement, a dare, a message that she knows that Romeo is exactly where she is, and feels exactly what she feels.

  And . . . we’re done.

  From then on, it’s whizz-bang-emote-crash-tragic-misunderstanding-muscle-boys-wherefore-art-thou-thou-is-dead. But you’re in all that to the death because of what happens between these two beautiful young actors in precisely one minute of screen-time, with a fish tank. Keep in mind, their first looks aren’t even played to each other, but to some point just off-camera. I often wonder what Luhrmann did to get that bliss out of DiCaprio. Tell him Scorsese had just called? Hold up a mirror?

  Anyway . . . William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (bloody hell) is almost as good as West Side Story, and maybe a little better than the 1968 Franco Zefferelli version, largely because Claire Danes is in a different acting league to Olivia Hussey (see Black Christmas, here). If the film as a whole lacks the charm of Luhrmann’s low-budget debut Strictly Ballroom, it still marked the Aussie out as something special until Australia made you realise that the guy needs to stop spending money and showing off and remember why he used to be so good. But, as next up for Baz is DiCaprio as The Great Gatsby in 3D, one suspects that that time may be some way off.

  ’Tis a pity. Because his gift is not epic settings and a fondness for smacking the viewer around with his virtuosity. It’s that he gets romance. He’s in love with young lovers and remembers how they feel. You couldn’t give the most famous love story of all to a more fitting modern director.

  STARSHIP TROOPERS

  1997

  Starring: Casper Van Diem, Dina Meyer, Denise Richards, Neil Patrick Harris, Michael Ironside

  Dir.: Paul Verhoeven

  Plot: Star Wars rewritten as an anti-fascist teen parable. Plus giant spiders.

  Key line: ‘It’s an ugly planet. A bug planet. A planet hostile to life. A . . . GGGGAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!’

  Sometimes I truly worry about people.

  Starship Troopers begins like this: A fake commercial, advertising the pleasures of young people joining the military. As the square-jawed soldiers beam and repeat their devotion to duty, a small boy, no older than 8, fully dressed in military uniform, jumps out from nowhere and yelps, ‘I’m doing my part too!’ The line of soldiers laugh in a toothy, forced manner. A flag with a fascistic insignia flies as the announcer implores you to ‘Join the mobile infantry and save the world!’ The words, ‘Service guarantees citizenship’ are added quickly, like ‘terms and conditions apply’.

  Cut to another ad. This time we are in space and being told a fear-mongering tale about ‘Bug Meteors’. A caption reads ‘Why We Fight’, a reference to Frank Capra’s notorious World War II propaganda movies that used footage from the enemy to persuade America’s boys to sign up. The film explains why a planet called Klendathu must be ‘eliminated’. The propaganda becomes news, as we join the Klendathu invasion live, and are shouted at by the futuristic sci-fi equivalent of an embedded war reporter. While some kind of fight wages around him, the reporter starts in with the colour about what a terrible planet it is. No kidding. One of the ‘bugs’ that is supposedly bombing Earth with meteor showers swings into view. Before we get a good look, it has scooped the reporter up in its buggy jaws and snapped him in half. Soldiers who look no older than 16 scatter and panic. One of them tells us to get out of here. The soldiers regroup and shoot at the bug but to no avail. The bug crushes the soldier like a, well, bug.

  We then get a caption saying ‘One Year Earlier’ and cut to a classroom where a bald man with a stump where one of his arms should be is explaining recent history to a class of clean teens in a few brusque sentences. Democracy failed. ‘The social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos.’ The ‘veterans’ instigated a global military coup and ‘imposed a stability that has lasted for generations since’. The teacher states that society functions politically through ‘force. Force is violence . . . the supreme authority from which all other authorities derive.’

  Why do I worry about people? When this brilliant satire was first released, some people, including actual critics, thought it was a pro-fascist movie. I don’t even know where to go with this. When the teacher, Michael Ironside as Lt Jean Rasczak, mentions Hiroshima and states that ‘Naked force has resolved more issues throughout history than any other factor’ . . . some decided that that was the director stating a firmly held philosophical opinion! They looked at the way the troopers’ uniforms were cleverly designed around former Nazi designs, and thought that they were saying that the Nazis were teen heroes!!! One assumes they all thought Team America: World Police was a desperate plea for America to bomb more Arab countries and blow up the Eiffel Tower. I despair. But not as much as Paul Verhoeven, I would imagine.

  The Dutch master had already pulled the sci-fi satire trick once, and been misunderstood because he has this habit of playing dialogue and acting for laughs, and fight sequences and subtext straight, and expecting his audience to notice the difference. His 1987 classic Robocop is based in exactly the same future-world where corporate fascism reigns, people are hardsold laws through television ads which always ask, ‘Would you like to know more?’, and power looks for simple, violent solutions to complex problems. In case anyone was still under any misunderstanding about the theme of Starship Troopers, Verhoeven explains it himself, with admirable brevity, on the recent DVD’s director’s commentary: ‘War makes fascists of us all.’

  A number of other things make Starship Troopers an unusual picture. It is essentially B-movie pulp fiction, but at epic length and cost: a budget of $105 million dollars and a running time of over two hours. At a time when everyone in American cinema was being encouraged to act naturally, Verhoeven insists his performers throw back to the kind of arch comic-book style of Star Wars, Raiders Of The Lost Ark and old Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers movies and TV shows.

  And, finally . . . he makes this epic space opera-satire-throwback-splatter-film-that-makes-you-go-‘bleurgh!’ into a teen movie. Complete with aching teen romance and coming-of-age themes. And then he makes the whole mess work. I would, quite literally, genuflect, if I met the guy.

  The script was loosely based upon a 1959 novel, called Starship Troopers, by conservative science-fiction author Robert A. Heinlein. Very loosel
y, I guess, as Verhoeven confesses on the directors’ commentary that he started to read the novel and never finished it because it made him ‘bored and depressed’. This leaves Verhoeven and screenwriter to devise a fascinating future familiar to fans of the Alien movies and the recent, brilliant, Battlestar Galactica TV serial. This is a world where humanity has spread beyond Earth and corporate fascism has successfully dispensed with geographical borders and traditional gender roles. People who are white and American come from Buenos Aires. Women work and fight alongside men as equals. Being a ‘citizen’ of humanity is not a right, but a privilege earned by serving in the military. If you don’t fight the enemy – which, currently, is the arachnids, or bugs from outer space – then you don’t get to vote or be an equal member of the species. It’s a society that makes a kind of sense, which is probably why Starship Troopers has been misunderstood. The idea that fascism might produce some good things among the very, very bad is the kind of concept that quality science fiction has always played with because it is a genre concerned with finding metaphors for our present existence. But if sci-fi isn’t your thing, that’s probably all a bit morally ambiguous. We like our liberalism conservative, now don’t we?

  Key to the film’s blend of the dreamy and the gnarly are the fresh-faced, square-jawed ensemble cast. Casper Van Diem (Johnny Rico), Dina Meyer (Dizzy Flores), Denise Richards (Carmen Ibanez), Jake Busey (Ace Levy) and the sainted Neil Patrick Harris (Carl Jenkins) are all entirely perfect as perfect American children: beautiful, strong, bright, peppy, buff and possessed of gleaming white gnashers. They handle the meat of the film brilliantly, which is that, while they are at school, being filled with propaganda about the heroism (and exceptional career prospects) of military service, the concept of war is a mixture of career move and exciting game. They are more interested in who they’re going to be sleeping with, just like any other teenagers. But then basic training is over, and they face the horrifying reality: that they are risking their lives fighting an enemy that is far more ferocious and powerful than their mentors led them to believe, for reasons that are entirely obscure. They are arbitrarily sorted into infantry and officer-class, the former an expendable gaggle of working-class hard men and women, destined to be shipped home in half a dozen body bags, the latter a remote elite who are authorised to play with the former’s lives. Is any of this starting to sound familiar?