The dead wanted to vote, alright. They just didn’t want to vote for us.

Masters of Horror:

Homecoming

(2005)

(SPOILERS) Joe Dante’s debut contribution to anthology horror show Masters of Horror was widely acclaimed as the first season’s standout episode, all eyes fixed on its overt political message. It even snagged the No.19 spot on Vulture’s 25 Best Horror Movies since The Shining (although, since Tarantino’s atrocious Death Proof featured, there’s no accounting for taste). I’ve got to admit, though, as disposed as I am towards venerating Dante, I found the episode so lacking in any form of subtlety or nuance as render it entirely rote. Indeed, the most interesting aspect of Homecoming ends up being the retro-noir narration, like a zombie apocalypse version of Double Indemnity.

Sam Hamm, who penned Tim Burton’s Batman, furnished a script where everything is on the surface. The subtext is the text. These zombies don’t represent consumer society, commies or anything so Romero-ish; they’re straight-up soldiers, back from the dead because they’re pissed off about being sent to wage a meaningless war and determined to vote the Republican president out of office. Dante sounded off that he was incensed by the Iraq situation, and couldn’t figure out why it was left to Homecoming to act as the lone voice of protest. The problem with this is, expressing a noble sentiment so audibly doesn’t necessarily make the vehicle well-expressed. The extent of his uncharacteristic seriousness is seen in the relative absence of in-references (aside from Jacques Tourneur rising from the grave).

Homecoming’s at its best with the sub-Network antics of media manipulation (something Dante has explored before, in the likes of The Howling and The Second Civil War), but even then the writing is too forward to be considered really smart or subversive. Thea Gill is an Anne Coulter-esque right-wing pundit reeling off renta-quotes berating liberals, when a mother comes on air to explain she was detained by the Secret Service for heckling the President (“I stood up and asked him, why did my son die? The WMD weren’t there, the nuclear program wasn’t there, the threat wasn’t there”). At which point, possibly weaving some unintended spell, fellow guest and presidential speechwriter David Murch (Jon Tenney), who lost a brother to Vietnam, pipes up, stating that if he he had one wish “I would ask your son to come back”.

Political advisor Kurt Rand (Robert Picardo, essentially Karl Rove) compliments Murch on his inventiveness, incorporating the dialogue into the President’s next speech, and before we know it soldiers are rising from their coffins. Picardo’s is a suitably relishable Dante turn, and he has some of the pithiest lines (“Private Wheeler died on the operating table, after which he put up a hell of a fight”). When Murch notes the dead man feels pain, Rand rejoinders, “Ah hell, he volunteered”. Pondering why they have come back, he concludes “Couldn’t be the disability benefits”. And, like a typical Dante opportunist, he sees potential in the situation rather than cost (“If we could keep the same dead GIs out on the battlefield forever, that’s like the answer to a prayer”).

The problem is, the bright idea has nowhere left to go after it has been set up, and includes such maudlin scenes as a couple tending a lost zombie GI, telling him “We want you to know that somebody does appreciate you”, complete with treacly music (the flashback, in which Murch as a child shoots his veteran brother, is so overwrought as to be unintentionally funny).

Amid his bid for topicality, Hamm is forced to recognise the logical restraints he’s set himself, the implication that all other wars must be assumed to have been fought for good reason, by way of suggesting those veterans who haven’t returned believed in their fights (before backtracking and including Vietnam). There’s the occasional sharp swipe at the electoral system (scoffing that a couple of hundred votes wont change anything, someone counters by mentioning Florida), but this is a piece that, to be really on-point, ought to have had the GIs conclude it was useless voting for anyone as they’re all as bad as each other.

Homecoming isn’t a dodo by any means; it’s proficiently made, and quite watchable, but the hype it received far outweighs its actual merit. Strange as it may sound to say it, it’s actually rather shallow, and could have delivered its salient points in half the running time.

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She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

You’re never the same man twice.

The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970)
(SPOILERS) Roger Moore playing dual roles? It sounds like an unintentionally amusing prospect for audiences accustomed to the actor’s “Raise an eyebrow” method of acting. Consequently, this post-Saint pre-Bond role (in which he does offer some notable eyebrow acting) is more of a curiosity for the quality of Sir Rog’s performance than the out-there premise that can’t quite sustain the picture’s running time. It is telling that the same story was adapted for an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents 15 years earlier, since the uncanny idea at its core feels like a much better fit for a trim 50 minute anthology series.

Basil Dearden directs, and co-adapted the screenplay from Anthony Armstrong’s novel The Strange Case of Mr Pelham. Dearden started out with Ealing, helming several Will Hay pictures and a segment of Dead of Night (one might imagine a shortened version of this tale ending up there, or in any of the portmanteau horrors that arrived in the year…

Rejoice! The broken are the more evolved. Rejoice.

Split (2016)
(SPOILERS) M Night Shyamalan went from the toast of twist-based filmmaking to a one-trick pony to the object of abject ridicule in the space of only a couple of pictures: quite a feat. Along the way, I’ve managed to miss several of his pictures, including his last, The Visit, regarded as something of a re-locating of his footing in the low budget horror arena. Split continues that genre readjustment, another Blumhouse production, one that also manages to bridge the gap with the fare that made him famous. But it’s a thematically uneasy film, marrying shlock and serious subject matter in ways that don’t always quite gel.

Shyamalan has seized on a horror staple – nubile teenage girls in peril, prey to a psychotic antagonist – and, no doubt with the best intentions, attempted to warp it. But, in so doing, he has dragged in themes and threads from other, more meritable fare, with the consequence that, in the end, the conflicting positions rather subvert his attempts at subversion…

‘Cos I’m the gringo who always delivers.

American Made (2017)
(SPOILERS) This is definitely more the sort of thing Tom Cruise should be doing, a movie that relies both on his boyish™ charm and at least has pretensions of ever so slightly pushing the envelope of standard multiplex fare, rather than desperately attaching himself to an impersonal franchise (The Mummy) or flailingly attempting to kick start one (Jack Reacher: Never Go Back); remember when Cruise wouldn’t even go near sequels (for about 20 years, The Color of Money aside, and then only the one series)? American Made is still victim to the tendency of his movies to feel superstar-fitted rather than remaining as punchy as they might be on paper (Made’s never quite as satirically sharp as it wants to be), but it at least doesn’t lead its audience by the nose.

Two hundred thousand pounds, for this outstanding example of British pulchritude and learning.

The Avengers 4.18: The Girl From Auntie
I’ve mentioned that a few of these episodes have changed in my appreciation since I last watched the series, and The Girl from Auntie constitutes a very pronounced uptick. Indeed, I don’t know how I failed to rate highly the estimable Liz Fraser filling in for Diana Rigg – mostly absent, on holiday –for the proceedings (taking a not dissimilar amateur impostor-cum-sidekick role to Fenella Fielding in the earlier The Charmers). I could watch Fraser all day, and it’s only a shame this was her single appearance in the show.

By Jove, the natives are restless tonight.

The Avengers 4.17: Small Game for Big Hunters
I wonder if Death at Bargain Prices’ camping scene, suggestive of an exotic clime but based in a department store, was an inspiration for Small Game For Big Hunters’ more protracted excursion to the African country of Kalaya… in Hertfordshire. Gerry O’Hara, in his second of two episodes for the show again delivers on the atmosphere, making the most of Philip Levene’s teleplay.

Old Boggy walks on Lammas Eve.

Jeeves and Wooster 2.5: Kidnapped (aka The Mysterious Stranger)
Kidnapped continues the saga of Chuffnell Hall. Having said of 2.4 that the best Wodehouse adaptations tend to stick closely to the text, this one is an exception that proves the rule, diverging significantly yet still scoring with its highly preposterous additions.

Jeeves: Tis old boggy. He be abroad tonight. He be heading for the railway station.
Gone are many of the imbroglios involving Stoker and Glossop (the estimable Roger Brierley), including the contesting of the former’s uncle’s will. Also gone, sadly, is the inebriated Brinkley throwing potatoes at Stoker, which surely would have been enormous fun. Instead, we concentrate on Bertie being locked aboard Stoker’s yacht in order to secure his marriage to Pauline (as per the novel), Chuffy tailing Pauline in disguise (so there’s a different/additional reason for Stoker to believe Bertie and she spent the night together, this time at a pub en route to Chufnell Hall) and …

I think we’ve returned to Eden. Surely this is how the World once was in the beginning of time.

1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992)
Ridley Scott’s first historical epic (The Duellists was his first historical, and his first feature, but hardly an epic) is also one of his least remembered films. It bombed at the box office (as did the year’s other attempted cash-ins on the discovery of America, including Superman: The Movie producers the Salkinds’ Christopher Columbus: The Discovery) and met with a less than rapturous response from critics. Such shunning is undeserved, as 1492: Conquest of Paradise is a richer and more thought-provoking experience than both the avowedly lowbrow Gladiator and the re-evaluated-but-still-so-so director’s cut of Kingdom of Heaven. It may stand guilty of presenting an overly sympathetic portrait of Columbus, but it isn’t shy about pressing a critical stance on his legacy.

Sanchez: The truth is, that he now presides over a state of chaos, of degradation, and of madness. From the beginning, Columbus proved himself completely incapable of ruling these islands…

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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