Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  Writer Jeffery Reddick’s original premise is dastardly in its simplicity. Fascinated by the horror of and conspiracy theories surrounding the 1996 mid-air explosion of TWA Flight 800, Reddick wondered if this unexplained tragedy that killed 230 people could only be explained by predestination: the victims were meant to die, so they did. When various psychics insisted that they had had premonitions about the explosion, the plot of Final Destination was complete. What if you had a premonition of a disaster, and saved your own life and those of a few other people? But if your death is part of a carefully constructed plan, then death itself could not let you walk away from your fate, lest the entire pattern be destroyed. It would track down you and your fellow survivors and kill you. So . . . how could you possibly escape and live long enough to build up crippling debts and complain about young people and their music?

  Fellow X Files writer James Wong got it and pursued his debut directorial project as modernised teen Alfred Hitchcock, complete with crazy camera angles, suspenseful close-ups on faces and objects, scary orchestral score and black, black humour. With Scream (see here) having reset the teen slasher genre as a postmodern form of meta-film-making, he and screenwriters Reddick and Glen Morgan named the characters of the film after horror movie legends: Alex Browning (Sawa) after Freaks director Tod Browning; teacher Valerie Lewton after B-movie producer Val Lewton; Terry Chaney after movie monster actor Lon Chaney; and, of course, Billy Hitchcock, played by doofus du jour Seann William Scott. Heavyweight legends to compare yourself to. But Wong and co. earned the right, because Final Destination is spectacularly great film-making. And if you don’t believe me, clock the opening scenes.

  So we meet Alex and find out that his high school class are flying to Paris for a study trip. Cue an orgy of fatal foreshadowing at the airport. A Hare Krishna type saying, ‘Death is not the end.’ Numerological omens and flight signs saying, ‘Terminal’. A girl looking at pictures of Princess Diana’s death in a magazine.

  The brilliance of the opening sequence lies in how much creeping unease Wong and soundtrack composer Shirley Walker inject into the slowly revealed, familiar details of air travel . . . the bland suspension of the waiting areas; the luggage cart blinking beneath your feet as you walk over the boardwalk to the plane; the crying baby and the disabled man, the straight, plasticky lines of the overhead baggage cabins. The dread is cut with the dumb banter of excited teens pretending to be cool . . . boorish plans to cop off with the hot girls, bickering about money, snogging jocks. All are rendered scary by the sombre portent of Walker’s score and sudden close-ups on Devon Sawa’s increasingly drawn, terrified face.

  We take off, things are fine, and we settle down for an airplane thriller which will play out at the same, suspenseful pace. But . . . nah. We’re suddenly thrust into turbulence, chaos, shrieking and the collective nightmare of those oxygen masks we hope will never pop out of their hidey-holes while we are in a plane. We’re going down. The plane disintegrates. Balls of fire and people sucked, weightless, into the night sky. The obvious only begins to dawn when a really big ball of fire rolls through what’s left of the plane and incinerates our hero – yep, all a bad dream. Dream sequences are always perfectly fair game – unless you do it at the end of your movie, in which case you are the storytelling equivalent of a 12-year-old and should seek alternative employment in the growing field of fast food. But here, it’s not a dream. It’s a premonition. As we discussed, everyone’s death is pre-ordained. Young Alex has got The Sight, and escapes death with a handful of classmates and a teacher. But just ’cos you got death sussed doesn’t mean that you can cheat it. Remember how good it is at chess?

  The sequels get increasingly silly. But the strength of the first movie is that it plays its scenario straight. It is respectful to the tragedy that inspired it and expertly balances laughing at death while taking grief quite seriously. Its early high school funeral scenes have a post-Columbine feel. It also has a believable take on how someone truly psychic might be treated by those around them, implying that the modern world hasn’t moved on too far from the desire to burn witches at the stake.

  But you don’t wanna know about all that. You want the Final Destination franchise’s perennially popular USP. You want funny deaths. You want the Rube Goldberg machine.

  Rube Goldberg was an American artist, inventor and cartoonist whose work in newspapers made him hugely popular in the States from around 1915 and onwards. His specialty was comic contraptions that accomplished simple tasks by ludicrously complex means. Familiar versions on this theme might be, for example, the complex series of mechanical tools to feed the dog and make coffee triggered by clocks in the brilliantly shot opening scene of Back To The Future (see here); or the fiendish but ultimately not-as-efficient-as-shooting-him-in-the-head killing machines utilised by Bond villains; or, my personal favourite, the bizarre series of pulleys, anvils and fake mountain pathways Wile E. Coyote would buy from capitalist running dogs Acme in his futile attempts to kill and eat Roadrunner.

  This last is most pertinent to the cartoon ingenuity of Final Destination’s mortal coil shufflings, which are introduced to the cinematic lexicon by the unfortunate demise of Alex’s best friend Tod (Tod is German for ‘death’). The kid goes into his bathroom to do his normal ablutions. While he’s taking a dump, water begins to drip out of the lavatory faucet and on to the tiled bathroom floor. Tod picks up a standard razor while the water seeps towards him, but immediately cuts himself. He sees a shadow pass behind him in the mirror, but there’s nothing there. He starts to cut his nose hairs. Just as the water is snaking towards his bare feet, he decides to plug a radio into the wall socket. A neat music critic joke: John Denver’s ‘Rocky Mountain High’ plays, and he hurriedly pulls the plug just before the water barbecues him. He walks from the mirror and the water magically turns after him. All this, incidentally, is cut with an obsessed Alex in his bedroom, surrounded by air disaster books, trying to distract himself with a copy of Penthouse, being freaked out by an owl at his window and ending up with a bit of paper stuck to his trousers that says, ‘Tod’.

  Cut back to the doomed Tod in question. He finally slips on the water and falls face first into the bathtub, pausing only to let the metal cord from the bath plug whiplash around his neck. He chokes in Hitchockian tribute style, and his eyes turn a stylish shade of red and his skin an equally striking shade of blue, and he eventually hangs himself while sitting down in his own bath. Job done, the water slides gracefully back underneath the toilet. Heh.

  Although the romance between the excellently intense Alex and tough loner artist Clear Rivers (Larter) generates some proper chemistry and rooting-for-’em feelings, from then on the movie is really all about your favourite surrealist slaughter as the survivors of the air tragedy are picked off one by one by an invisible but unstoppable enemy. In opposition to old Rube, one of the best deaths belongs to ditzy jock girlfriend Terry, who says ‘drop fucking dead’ and then gets hit by a bus with a shock hyper-speed effect that has been ripped off so many times it deserves its own blue plaque outside Graumann’s.

  The quintuple death of teacher Valerie Lewton – throat slit by shard of exploding computer monitor, then chased into kitchen by ring of fire, then stabbed by falling kitchen knife, which is then hammered into her chest by a falling chair, before her house blows up – is sick genius. But I am especially fond of Seann William Scott’s decapitation by railway chain.

  Those who sniff about the absence of art within Final Destination must be mental, or plain blind. Wong modernises Hitchcock here with both a dark humour and a technical virtuosity way beyond more ‘serious’ directors like De Palma (see Carrie, here) and Van Sant (see Elephant, here). His use of deep focus, elliptical angles and Walker’s music to suffuse the most innocent household object with layer upon layer of dread is so strong that the movie becomes a satire on both labour saving devices and all the futile things we’ve invented to see off the one inevitable fact of life. That would be death, in case you were
wondering, and Wong thinks it’s very, very funny that humanity believes that its technological wonders will, eventually, stop us from dying, and that that would be anything but an utter disaster. Seat belts come in for an especially hard time so, if you are a health and safety control freak, this is not the movie for you. Or maybe it is. You need to start accepting the inevitable, Buddy.

  Final Destination is probably the only mainstream popcorn hit which forcibly puts the point that it’s best if we all go, sooner rather than later, because the longer we stick around, the more of our planet we kill. It doesn’t put it that baldly, because it’s too busy tying an anvil around our necks and dropping us off a cliff to go all Al Gore on us guys.

  BATTLE ROYALE

  2000

  Starring: Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda, Taro Yamamoto, Takeshi Kitano, Masanobu Ando, Kou Shibasaki

  Dir.: Kinji Fukasaku

  Plot: Juvenile delinquency’s Final Solution.

  Key line: ‘If you hate someone, you take the consequences.’

  If you are one of those who watched the August 2011 riots in England and, outraged by the violence and greed, felt that the best solution was to send all these ‘mindless’, ‘feral’ ‘kids’ off to some remote island where they could happily set fire to and steal from each other . . . then this is the movie for you.

  In Fukasaku’s controversial and internationally successful adaptation of Koshun Takami’s novel, a class of disobedient school-children are sent to an island to slaughter each other. They are victims of the Battle Royale Act, a desperate attempt by Japanese society to force its children to behave in a society in which the economic and social fabric has completely disintegrated. The film is extraordinary . . . a virtuoso mix of science fiction cautionary tale, post-apocalypse scaremongering, teen soap opera, black comedy, grand guignol slasher movie, surreal art film, twist-laden thriller, juvenile war movie and pure edge-of-the-seat action. Quentin Tarantino recently named it the best movie made since he began his directing career, which only goes to show that he’s a much better film critic than film-maker.

  Class B of the Kanagawa high school are drugged and taken to an island where their old teacher is primed and ready to let them loose upon each other. The rules of the game are set out in a horrifying and darkly comic twist on all the classroom scenes we’ve previously looked at, as the children are informed that they will be cast adrift on the island and forced to murder one another until only one survives.

  The Battle Royale info video Class B are then shown is deeply influenced by the military propaganda ads in Starship Troopers (see here). Battle Royale laughs at consumerism, at the hyper-positivity of ads aimed at children, and at the idea that the designer goods and status symbols that modern teens fetishise could – and perhaps should – be used against them. Violence and consumerism are one and the same thing here: and survival is the best product on offer, and only available to one young savage.

  ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano is perfect as the children’s deadpan, mocking torturer-in-chief, Kitano. When we meet him at the beginning of the movie he is an embattled teacher in a suit, tired and defeated, getting accidentally stabbed by one of the wild boys and apparently seeking no reprisals. Once the Class B kids have been drugged and despatched to the Battle Royale island – with the new teacher who had apparently protested about their fate now a bloody corpse, paraded in front of them – Takeshi is now a thug in a track-suit, taking out whispering school kids with knives thrown right between the eyes, and taking laconic pleasure in the prospect of his ex-pupils ripping each other new arseholes for the kicks and thrills of an angry nation. There are few actors in existence who could embody every right-winger who has ever loved the idea of all rebellious young people being physically attacked until they break and conform without cackling maniacally and twirling a metaphorical moustache. But Kitano, who, in movies directed by himself and others, has specialised in the . . . sorry, but there really is no other word . . . inscrutable existential killer, was born to be this Kitano, murdering kids for fun, making you enjoy watching him do it . . . and being one scary motherfucker.

  This is also very much post-Alien, Starship Troopers and Lara Croft in its attitude to women. There is no sign here that men have any natural advantage in the violence of either the state or the teens. The winner of the previous Battle Royale, whom we see at the beginning of the film, is an increasingly familiar sight for fans of Asian extreme cinema: a small cute girl rendered hideous by long, dark feral hair, blood-splattered skin, and a smile pitched somewhere between the Mona Lisa, Carrie White and Nosferatu. Female soldiers in gas masks hand out beatings, and our ironically enthusiastic video is presented by the stereotype of the peppy, Hello Kitty, Japanese teen girl pop fan.

  The music plays a key role; a constant soundtrack of exclamation mark orchestral flourishes and fanfares, smothering every image with a postmodern irony that enables the viewer to laugh at and with what is, when all is said and done, a movie about the sadistic abuse of children by an out-of-control police state. And numbers play a key role, too. Every time a kid buys the farm, a caption flashes up telling you how many players are left alive. The obvious allusion is to shoot-’em-up video games, and we can’t help but wonder whether we’re doing the killing using the fingers and joysticks of the film-makers. The movie wants to help us out, so it keeps score.

  Oh yeah . . . a pretty vital deus-ex-machina. The children are forced to play the game by way of unremovable neckbands that track the kids’ movements and blow the throat out if they’re not following the rules. Many of the reviews of Battle Royale compare the movie to William Golding’s classic kids-turn-feral-on-desert-island novel Lord Of The Flies. But Golding was examining theories of what children – and, by implication, adults – would be if left to their own devices without authority. The kids in Battle Royale are forced – by authority, by surveillance, by technology – to turn savage, or die. The only similarity to Golding’s vision is the remote island.

  What’s that? Where are the parents? Glad you asked. They’ve been ‘notified’. That’s it. Ha!

  As the movie is in the Japanese tradition, only a total rock star like Takeshi gets to be understated. These kids are mad-eyed screamers or born ninjas, with dimensions only allowed for Fujiwara, Maeda and Yamamoto as principal heroes Shuya, Noriko and Kawada. But these performances and characters are absolutely vital, because, without them, we’re into Human Centipede/Saw pointless sadism territory. You have to care about these kids to care about how this all turns out. The morality of the piece begins to surface early and needs strong characterisation to hit it home: which of these kids immediately conform to the rules of the game and think only of their own survival, and which are made redeemable by their reluctance to kill and willingness to rebel?

  This is an awesome action thriller high concept, and Fukasaku doesn’t waste any of its possibilities and potential intrigues. Will more than one kid survive? If so, who and how? Can a bunch of bewildered children somehow fight back, kill the bad guys, and repeal the BR Law? Will anyone find true love while they’re at it? Who are these two mysterious, sexy male model-looking boys who none of Class B have ever seen before? And who is gonna wipe that smirk off the face of ultimate Bad Dad Beat Takeshi? It’s this simple thriller stuff that keeps you enthralled, rather than the subtexts about youth crime and punishment and the inevitable collapse of capitalism. And without great teen acting, the movie would just be exploitation without anything for a viewer to root for . . . which is always failed exploitation.

  As the mayhem progresses, Battle Royale sketches in the reasons why some form of united front among the combatants is problematic. We see flashbacks of the usual high school nastiness and name-calling, but here standard teen angst has become charged with something far more deadly. School, as we all know, is already a teen war zone, and mutual trust is unlikely when these kids are locked into patterns of cliques, bullying, romantic rivalries and humiliations. It’s these short flashbacks that lend the movie poignancy, and k
eep it tethered to somewhere the viewer understands in an otherwise ridiculous sci-fi situation. Battle Royale pulls this off more convincingly than A Clockwork Orange (see here) and Starship Troopers because, in spite of the high body count, it has a big heart and an extraordinary sympathy for the pressure put upon ordinary teens. Most of these scenes are unashamedly corny. But Battle Royale isn’t trying to be Kids (see here) More than anything, it wants you to have fun. And much of the fun comes from Fukasaku’s’s ability to cut from teen soap to horror nightmare at the flick of an emotional switch.

  The setting is also spectacular. An island of rugged splendour that allows many gorgeous shots of unhappy children set against enormous skies, it is made evocative of harsher places by the cruel ironies of the gamekeepers. Rousing classical music by Verdi, Strauss, Bach and Schubert is played over booming loudspeakers (bringing Apocalypse Now to mind) as Kitano cheerily announces the names of the dead. The island increasingly resembles a mix of human zoo and concentration camp. Intimations of fascism drench Battle Royale, and you can feel the movie’s accusatory anger at Japan’s past as a member of the mid-20th century’s true Axis Of Evil.

  But politics is overwhelmed by pathos, as the film’s most poignant theme slowly emerges. The teen romance is heartrending and made more powerful by the complete absence of sex. These kids are too busy surviving – and distrusting – to fuck. There isn’t even a kiss. So the most beautiful declarations of everlasting devotion are made as children die, leaving their love untainted by mundane reality. The film becomes, first and foremost, a tale about trust and friendship, and how hard those things are to find, and how human life is worthless without them.