Less ubiquitous than the 1925 abridgement, this original and uncut version of Stoker's last novel is no less surreal and just as shocking for having been written by the same man who penned Dracula, one of the greatest horror novels of all time. It's inane, self-contradictory, badly plotted, and poorly written; it is so bizarre, in fact, that it becomes, in its own way, weirdly fascinating. Lady Arabella March is the White Worm, a legendary antediluvian snake of enormous size; the last of her kind, she has existed for millenia in England where, as the story begins, she can be seen in her tight-fitting white dresses openly angling for a profitable marriage with the psychopathic owner of a neighboring estate. This madman, however, is more interested in much more delicate Lilla Watford, with whom he periodically engages in hypnotic battles of will -- that is, when he isn't monomanically transfixed by the huge kite he has set flying above his castle. Meanwhile, a couple of fellows from another nearby estate -- one an old diplomatist, the other a young buck from Australia -- having stumbled onto Lady Arabella's secret spend their days plotting her long overdue death. The impetus for the abridgement appears to have been Stoker's use of racial epithets for an ugly and mean-spirited (yet pathetically amorous) African character. That, and perhaps a simple desire to shorten the book, for not much of consequence is removed; rather, the hack job is confined mostly to removing paragraphs here and there throughout. The oddest edit is one involving the monster: an entire sequence is cut in which the monster pursues our intrepid heroes into a river, where it is mistaken for a white whale. As director Ken Russell used little more than the idea of a woman who could transform herself into a giant snake for his 1988 adaptation, it is impossible to know whether his inspiration was this book or the abridgement. Read at your own risk.
+1/2
Less ubiquitous than the 1925 abridgement, this original and uncut version of Stoker's last novel is no less surreal and just as shocking for having been written by the same man who penned Dracula, one of the greatest horror novels of all time. It's inane, self-contradictory, badly plotted, and poorly written; it is so bizarre, in fact, that it becomes, in its own way, weirdly fascinating. Lady Arabella March is the White Worm, a legendary antediluvian snake of enormous size; the last of her kind, she has existed for millenia in England where, as the story begins, she can be seen in her tight-fitting white dresses openly angling for a profitable marriage with the psychopathic owner of a neighboring estate. This madman, however, is more interested in much more delicate Lilla Watford, with whom he periodically engages in hypnotic battles of will -- that is, when he isn't monomanically transfixed by the huge kite he has set flying above his castle. Meanwhile, a couple of fellows from another nearby estate -- one an old diplomatist, the other a young buck from Australia -- having stumbled onto Lady Arabella's secret spend their days plotting her long overdue death. The impetus for the abridgement appears to have been Stoker's use of racial epithets for an ugly and mean-spirited (yet pathetically amorous) African character. That, and perhaps a simple desire to shorten the book, for not much of consequence is removed; rather, the hack job is confined mostly to removing paragraphs here and there throughout. The oddest edit is one involving the monster: an entire sequence is cut in which the monster pursues our intrepid heroes into a river, where it is mistaken for a white whale. As director Ken Russell used little more than the idea of a woman who could transform herself into a giant snake for his 1988 adaptation, it is impossible to know whether his inspiration was this book or the abridgement. Read at your own risk.
3 Comments
++ Not a remake of Michael Mann's Manhunter, but a determindly fresh adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel as a prequel to the films The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, with Anthony Hopkins reprising his role as Hannibal Lecter. Will Graham, the man who at great personal cost originally captured Lecter (according to the films, not the books), is lured out of retirement to help catch another serial killer, one targeting entire families, and is compelled to seek advice from his old nemesis. With too-young-looking Edward Norton as Graham and too-handome Ralph Fiennes as the killer, and a great deal more hero worship of Lecter and his supercalifragilistic intellect. Employs elements of the book not found in Manhunter -- that is, all the worst ones, including the silly ending, to which screenwriter Ted Tally adds a ridiculous Friday the 13th-type twist. ++1/2 This is what noir looks like when its play of light and shadow has no psychological ground -- like just another crime drama. It is, however, one of those rare movies that reverses the typical trajectory and actually gets better as it goes along. Or rather, gets better after a certain point. The film is based on Cornell Woolrich's novel (written under his William Irish pseudonym), and so it is about the search for a woman who can provide a man falsely convicted of murdering his wife with the alibi he needs to avoid execution. The point at which it improves is also an improvement over the book. Where Woolrich was content to conceal his killer until the very end, hiding the malefactor behind literary obfuscation, Siodmak and screenwriter Bernard C. Schoenfeld reveal their "paranoiac" about halfway through, instantly heightening the drama and the suspense. But it isn't enough. This is noir light (contradiction intended), from the lightweight performances of the stars (despite Ella Raines' obvious efforts as the accused's loyal and loving friend) to Siodmak's professional yet toneless visuals. It's supposed to add up to a nightmare world of murder and betrayal, but in reality -- because the off-key theme music that is both too happy and too romantic links directly with the ending -- it comes off instead as little more than a weird detour in two interrupted lives. Also with Alan Curtis, Franchot Tone, and Thomas Gomez. +++ Reasonably good, fast-paced crime thriller about a diver who is hired to salvage a ship which, he discovers, hasn't sunk yet. Nominated at the time for an Edgar Award in the Paperback Original category, and it delivers on that level. Before it's all over John Lange (i.e., Michael Crichton) has mixed in money laundering, the Mafia, and missing World War II treasure. And a couple of vicious ocelots. Our hero doesn't say much, but that's probably because the plot is so breathless. +1/2 Truly awful film, based, vaguely, on the H. G. Wells novel of the same name. Unlucky plane crash survivor (David Thewlis) is picked up in the Java Sea and taken to a small island where a mad doctor with a God complex (Marlon Brando) mixes human and animal DNA in a quest to create a race of "superior" beings. Goes downhill the moment Brando appears, his face, hands and arms covered in pasty white cream, as if an allergy to sunlight were in any way relevant to his character or the story. (As metaphor for the need for him to do his work "in the dark," it is overkill of the highest order.) "The" story, in fact, is a misnomer: screenwriters Richard Stanley and Ron Hutchinson try to tell too many stories, one of which is an ironic mirror of their "accomplishment": even as the film devolves into incoherence, Moreau's horrible creations, without regular injections, regress to their disordered animal states. Meanwhile, the beast creatures chafe at their subjugation, and the survivor, in an idea cribbed not from the book but from the first adaptation of the book, The Island of Lost Souls, meets a beautiful woman (Fairuza Balk) with whom he develops a personal relationship. And then there's Montgomery, Moreau's all but superfluous assistant, played by Val Kilmer. A self-indulgent crazy-quilt of a movie, redeemed only by a few pretty pictures along the way. ++ Selfish dad (Tom Cruise) gets weekend custody of his rebellious teenage son (Justin Chatwin) and precocious ten-year-old daughter (Dakota Fanning), then gets a crash course in fatherly responsibility after Martians invade the Earth, killing or consuming everyone in sight. "Based on" -- which is to say suggested or inspired by -- H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds. This time, the Martians have hidden their gigantic tripedal fighting machines underground for thousands of years, evidently in patient expectation of the day when their preferred food -- mankind -- will have topped 6.5 billion units. (Had 6 billion been enough, they would have invaded in 1999.) The special effects are state-of-the-art, and the film has its moments, but any story that requires worldwide Armageddon to teach one dad the value of raising kids is not a strong one. And Spielberg, forgetting the lesson he should have learned from Jaws, infallibly substitutes action when dialogue would have served him better. With an even more pronounced sense of anticlimax at the end than the Byron Haskin version from 1953, and that because the screenwriters failed to give Wells the credit he deserved as a writer: while Wells wrote a realistic science-based ending to match his semi-historical novel, Josh Friedman and David Koepp simply tack the same ending on to their much narrower tale of personal redemption. ++++ Quite possibly King's best book -- despite the fact that it is King all over, which isn't always a good thing. It's wordy, it's got a kid much too advanced for his age, and it ends with that Mythbuster mentality that isn't satisfied until everything gets blown to hell. But this book, more than the others, is the one that was built for King's style. It's about Jack Torrance, an alcoholic man who carts his family along when he takes a job as the winter caretaker of a posh hotel in the Colorado mountains that just happens to be haunted. He doesn't know this going in, of course, nor does Wendy, his wife. But his son, Danny, does; his "shining" -- psychic talent -- clues him in real fast that the Overlook is one Bad Place. In the Overlook, King has a boogeyman just big enough for all those words and yet small enough to keep things focused. In other words, it isn't like Pet Semetary, which is the same length as The Shining, but all about that little place in the woods where Sparky was buried. And it's not like 11/22/63 either, which might have merited its 800-plus pages if were really about what happened on that date, but instead is split into three different stories rudely rammed together. King, you see, is a character guy. He said somewhere that his ideas tend to start with, Wouldn't it be funny if -- which makes him sound like a plot guy. But it's obvious that plot doesn't interest him nearly so much as his characters. His books don't run as long as they do because his plots are intricate or complex; they balloon because he can't stop riffing on the characters. Every once in awhile, he reaches a happy confluence of both. Most of King's characters, if they went looking for a house to contain their egos and their histories, would end up buying the Overlook Hotel. But only Jack Torrance gets to do that. He gets to do it because he's a haunted man who needs a haunted house to feel at home. Jack isn't a deep man, but he skates a wide surface. There's the time he broke his son's arm, the time when he and a friend nearly killed a kid, the time when his father attacked his mother, and so on. It's not without reason he thinks the Overlook is hot for him. But the Overlook has more than a quick roll in mind. For that, it needs Danny -- and for Jack, not being the favorite threatens to turn him into a living pun: a man overlooked. And that he can't abide. So this book is all about what happens when an insecure man with violent tendencies gets backed into a corner, when inner demons meet real demons. If they were serial killers, Jack would be Ottis Toole to the Overlook's Henry Lee Lucas. (Toole, in fact, lived for awhile in Boulder.) It's a match made in Hell, a Molotov cocktail. That's probably why King's explosive ending works much better here than in other novels. Usually it's not much more than an afterthought. Here, it's an inevitability. ++1/2 Sleazy TV exec (James Woods) and his sadomasochist girlfriend (Deborah Harry) are intrigued by the pirate broadcast of a new show that trades in torture and murder until they discover it is being used in a plot to control the minds of consumers. Not that that realization causes Woods to be any less sleazy nor Harry to be any less self-destructive, so good luck finding anyone to root for here. Starts out well, as a mystery-thriller, then devolves (its cult followers would no doubt remove the "d") into a full-blown reality-bender of a horror movie, in which anyone exposed to the show suffers graphic and sometimes grotesque hallucinations. Woods himself is shocked when, among other things, his abdomen develops an organic videotape slot. Cronenberg's fuzzy-headed commentary on the dangers of television (he clearly wasn't trying very hard to make a political point, though, in a vague sort of way, the movie presages torture porn and the rise of sex and violence both on TV and the internet) -- that, combined with characters like Brian O'Blivion (Jack Creley), who thinks people don't get enough TV, virtually guarantees that this film's only real attraction is its surreal imagery and bizarre absurdities. Well, it has plenty of both. Harry, of course, is more famous for having been the lead singer of the rock group Blondie. ++1/2 Too-cute followup to King Kong, made for about a third the cost of Kong and released later the same year, has none of the gravitas of the former film but retains a bit of its charm. Ten months after Kong's death, his captor, Carl Denham, mired in escalating legal and financial trouble, can't wait to return to Skull island after he learns of great treasure hidden there. Along for the ride are old friends Capt. Englehorn and Charlie, the Chinese cook from his previous adventure, and new friend Hilda Petersen (Helen Mack), whom he met earlier trying to coax some monkeys out of a tree. (When Denham objects to her method of persuasion, Hilda asks, "Have you ever caught a monkey?") The first thing they find on the island, however, isn't treasure, but King Kong's son, a 12-foot white ape that, "Androcles and the Lion"-style, becomes a friend after they rescue him from quicksand -- setting him up to later on provide some of the film's aforementioned cuteness. It's worth noting, though, that this encounter doesn't occur until well after the halfway point in the film, which is only 69 minutes long (Kong was 100). The long prelude ensures that the island portion will be rushed (and so, too, the effects themselves, jerkier here than in Kong), as the filmmakers hurry to squeeze in four monsters in addition to little Kong, as well as an apocalyptic ending the gods themselves would be proud of. Better than the monsters, in fact, are the lovely and atmospheric landscape paintings sprinkled throughout and often animated, as in Kong, with flying archaeopteryxes. Robert Armstrong is still perfect as the dynamic Denham and Mack, though no Fay Wray, at least doesn't have to spend half her time screaming. With Frank Reicher as Englehorn, Victor Wong as Charlie, and John Marston as the cowardly Norwegian who originally sold Denham the map to Kong's island and who returns here to tell him about the treasure he didn't bother to mention previously. ++1/2 A man convicted of his wife's murder must enlist a friend to help him find his only alibi witness, the woman he randomly picked up in a bar that night after a fight with his wife. Problem is, he never got her name and no one, starting with the bartender, remembers seeing her with him. The stakes in this race-against-time story are made plain at the starting gate: Chapter 1 is titled, "The Hundred and Fiftieth Day Before the Execution." Not made plain is Woolrich's willingness to fiddle with our perspective in order to preserve the mystery, nor the extent to which he will strain our credulity in solving it -- to say his plot is far-fetched is to assume that it is within throwing distance in the first place. But there are other reasons to read a Woolrich novel, even a pseudononymous one. His penchant for the bizarre, for one, most evident here in a vignette about a man being tortured simply by being looked at, constantly, hour after hour. Also his hard-driving prose, though that is muted somewhat for being too thinly spread. Turns out the friend isn't his only helper, he's got another woman on his side, as well, and a cop who isn't sorry he busted him but who has come to believe he's innocent just the same. The shifts back and forth between them break the tension. Made into a movie in 1944. |
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