Rococo Gold: THE HAUNTING remake is better than the original - yeah, I said it.

Everyone heaped so much abuse on Jan de Bont's 1999 HAUNTING remake when it first came out that I held off seeing it... until now... and boy am I mad. I could have been watching this film every day for years! Is it terrible? Naturally. But it's my kind of terrible. It's a terrible America needs on a cold rainy December Monday night after work when your feet hurt and the heater's spewing out weird mold smells and the cat's harassing you for more food and you just fed her. You need to take a shower but the thought of touching a faucet handle and feeling cold water while waiting for it to turn hot, hurts. Just the thought is as if imagining being dragged down an asphalt driveway in your shorts,  or looking down from a great height with no railing. The very thought of touching cold water or a cold metal handle burns the inside of your parchment skin like the thought of no junk burns the junkie. On and on, with no end in sight! Cat - feet - cold - thoughts like knives! Cats - feet... knives...

Rain... Monday... December cold...the journey home is dark and damp. The apartment is filthy. Why bother cleaning when it will just be filthy again?

But then THE HAUNTING emanates from Netflix Streaming like a warm absolving specter... not the original, but that maligned 1999 remake --it wipes all cares away in a wash of dark red satins and dark-eyed women.

Sure the CGI ghost aspect is super uncool today, that uncanny valley melting while staring us in the face like THE POLAR EXPRESS took a torrid zone detour. But in 1999 it had only just turned uncool. The idea of the uncanny valley was still forming -  no one quite knew why they were so skeeved out. So play along. Act surprised. Let's not alarm the children.

For me the tacky CGI ghosts are just part of the film's goofy rococo conceptual design. The production design for this magnificently colored and decorated house is so over the top, so immense, you feel like you've wafted through these tortured cavernous sets in dark dreams, the kind where part of you is thinking "it's 2PM, Erich, get up already" while the rest of you indulges in the heavy REMs. Such dark and well-lit purple-gold beauty meshed up against cutesy poo gold cherubs makes it all seem as if the ghosts are Disney ride sculptures come to life, as fake in their fakeness as the clay Orson Welles in HEAVENLY CREATURES (left). Let's remember, this film is from the 90s, so this HAUNTING is hoping to one day be made into ride. It's supposed to be fun, more like the original HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL than the pretentious Robert Wise original. It's not supposed to be a turgid white elephant downer with everyone snapping at one another and mouthing terrible pun-choked dismissive analysis that feels it has to justify itself to its imagined skeptics a dozen times a page. It has no ambition to be taken seriously in modern psychiatric circles. It's just trying to make it to 90 minutes, in peace, so it can go home, like everybody else.

So I guess that's what I mean by "better." I can admire the 1963 HAUNTING only from behind a velvet rope, while the remake invites me to walk around like SLEEP NO MORE through its beautiful sprawling, dark-colored, sprawling, uniquely designed, burgundy and blood sets, to get close up as the attractive dark-colored clotheshorse cast (the two girls anyway) to try and play off each other in cute bits of dark little business (and the men smirk and phone it in).

And during the prolonged climax Lili Taylor clobbers a CGI statue-come-to-life griffin with a shovel.

There's no comparison.

In the end, probably, it's taste preference: if you need artsy justification for pouring money and talent into a ghost story drain then you've already lost me. If the entire dark look of the film seems created to bring out the dusky lushness of Catherine Zeta Jones lip rouge then you have me, presuming I'm too beat by the cat-feet-heater-mold-Monday misery to resist. Winning acclaim and Michael Douglas would, you think, lift the Zeta above a desire to appear in throw pillow matinee nonsense like this, but the Zeta was made for just such nonsense and she knows it. Slinking around in her body like a luxuriant demon on a 24-hour pass (a demon who was expecting to rent some tired old lady and instead got this dope, vivacious body at the same price), she's so hot it's no wonder an old reprobate like Michael Douglas would drop whatever stone he was romancing to carry her away like an ADVENTURE TIME Ice King. She's a great one for interacting with good actors, a good mirror able to rise to any romantic opposite's heights or lows, but she's also fun riding up on mediocre scene partners, like when she connects with Owen Wilson--usually likable but here almost as insufferable as Russ Tamblyn--imitating his pronunciation, her eyes rolling at his self-adoring twinkle. With sweet and sacred Lili Taylor, though, she connects in a kind of patient slow-burn lesbian flirtation that doesn't have to go anywhere to be super foxy.

The women in both films are their best assets. The men the worst. As the 1963 original film's sole heir to the estate, Russ Tamblyn is such a one-note, "hey doc, come off it, ah? I mean (blah blah) but I never (blah blah) and all that jazz"-skeptic greedhead he can almost swamp the works, unless I'm in the kind of mood I can forgive him (for he is short and knows not what he does).
Wilson's character avoids that (he thinks he's there for an insomnia study) and seems mainly trying to fit in, and maybe hook up with Zeta. Well, who wouldn't? She sees right through Wilson's smug schtick but she doesn't snap his head off, treating him instead like her younger brother's puberty-hitting friend who keeps trying to find excuses to hang out in her room. I like when she's talking about Three AM making her feel like a genius, bringing about a general discussion of thoughts and inspiration, while all Owen can do is rant about the infomercials he watches. ("That's why god created barbiturates, honey" she tells him). But god also created the VCR, Owen. Watch goddamn WC Fields movies and learn how to drink like a man! You'll sleep like a bitch.

But the script and acting are fascinating throughout the remake as you get the idea these people really are meeting for the first time and all trying to impress each other, lying and inflating their egos, less secure and declamatory than in the original. I felt Manny Farber termites in some of the group's nervous politeness and campfire bonding in the first 1/3, the way the huge spaces of the house make them value each other as proof the scenery hasn't chewed them rather than vice versa, and the way their language betrays their lack of real life experience. When Owen tries to win Jones over by patronizingly talking about her in the third person to Liam, "I see a little Jackie Susann in Theo" for example, I like that she doesn't buy it, instead just gives him a "sarcastic chuckle" like she would if her five year old brother was making jealous jokes about her boyfriend.

Believe it or not, it's actually Liam Neeson who comes off the worst in this version, like he's never worked with CGI before! Bitch, what about STAR WARS? Oh yeah, he sleep-walked through that too. Don't get me wrong, I feel bad for actors forced to pretend with all their might that a ping-pong ball-covered boom mic is a racist caricature alien or a living four-poster bed, but that's why they get paid the big bucks. If I had to pick a favorite Liam moment - it's near the end when Liam has the demon bed hovering over him, fixing to stab him with one of its poster poles, and his reaction is more like a man hearing the phone ring while half-asleep than someone trying to not get crushed and devoured. Liam! Wake up! It's the devouring bed scene! Deathbed! The Bed that Eats!

Then there's the decor: floor to ceiling, vast, staggeringly ornate but beautiful, style so vividly and gorgeously unified that--in my misery--left me totally turned on and weirded out by it: cherubs don't usually creep me out in a good way but in a suffocating grandma doily under the candy dish way. Here, they're not scary but they don't suffocate me, and the house is so packed with great detail it's like the art directors thought they would never work again once this came out, so were determined to cram in the entirety of the rest of their life's artistic contributions into every hallway, no matter what it cost.

Then there's Jan de Bont's directorial style, which illuminates the difference between boring 'good' and fun 'bad'. Robert Wise, director of the original is a talented journeyman who occasionally gets inspired, as in parts of WEST SIDE STORY, but time and again mistakes boring for important (he didn't direct the dance numbers, so it's pretty easy to guess what he did direct --all the drippy nonsense between miscast Beymer and Wood). I love 50s sci-fi and have seen Hawks' original THING a hundred times but have only seen Wise's preachy DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL once or twice. Who wants to be reminded how lame humans are? Or suffer an all-American apple-cheeked sprat? Unless you're a nuclear war proponent, or ever took a potshot at a friendly, unarmed alien who only wanted to threaten you with planetary destruction, watching it is like getting yelled at for a crime you didn't commit. But oh it's iconic, Gort and all that. Yeah, what does Gort do? He just stops other people from doing things. He's strictly reactive. That's kind of Wise's style. Like DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, his HAUNTING is considered one of the definitive classics of the genre. Yeah but... does it soothe your anxious soul on cold rainy Monday evenings? Fuck no it doesn't. Everyone shouts and yells, Julie Harris frumps and frowns brilliantly but the lighting is too bright (these people sleep in brightly lit bedrooms) though it darkens as the film goes along--I'm sure an intentional effect as the night creeps over the narrative, and the photography gets better and better, but the fear is offset by a sometimes bombastic score, and the askew camera angles (following sounds across walls, etc.), the echo-laden booming sound effects, and the relentless inner monologue commentary from Harris all hammer at the soul--we never know what is a diegetic creepy house noise and what is 'interior' like Harris' monologues. And topping it all off is the patronizing way they all want to send her away from the house the more she wants to stay, packing her bags and booting her out the door, ignoring her protestations like a child's tantrum. If construed as patriarchal it might scan a "Yellow Wallpaper" illustration of the belittling of women and by association of the spiritual and intuitive, but it also begs the question of what else was Dr. Markway looking for if not this very reaction? Naturally he's worried about the scandal if she dies, but if he's conducting an experiment where are his cameras and recorders? He wants to document the paranormal but makes no attempt to do so, merely babbles his sub-Jungian "who knows what lurks beyond the known" blah blah, reacting to every new incident that can't be explained with a shrug.

The thing with Wise's version is that maybe it's not a ghost story at all. Maybe it's all just in Julie Harris's mind--though that wouldn't explain the dialogue or the fact that other people are seen reacting to it. Also, she's a great actress but I never much cared about what's going on in her mind. To me she lacks chemistry, charisma, grace. What she does have is a compendium of asexual old maid neuroses to the point she seldom becomes more than a shrill hysteric of the sort one wishes one wasn't related to, and there's no earthly reason James Dean would ever fall in love with her in EAST OF EDEN instead of Carroll Baker! I love Lili Taylor though, in this version, and the dusky burgundy color scheme gives her eyes a steady twinkle - her emotions are always so on her sleeve that we're never sure just how much of what's going on is due to her own psychic projection or ours. We're spared interior monologues, drab patriarchal coddlings, and all the other malarkey associated with Harris' neurotic old maid. Not only do I want to know what's on Taylor's mind, I feel like I do - the window is wide open--she doesn't need that trite inner commentary.

Lili Taylor uses the Liz Taylor style of acting, Harris the Vivian Leigh style (i.e. movie acting vs. theater acting). Even when she's holding back, Taylor's like a cat that just swallowed a canary of a role and isn't afraid to let a few feathers fall out of her mouth. Harris or Leigh would just waft into the room with one of the feathers in her arms, cradling it like the calla lilies are in bloom again.

No, there's only one reason to re-watch the 1963 HAUNTING: foxy lesbian psychic Claire Bloom, especially in the sexy-scary bed scenes with Harris (though again, the scariness is undone by the flat TV lighting. But there are three reasons to see the 1999 edition: the gorgeous interior sets (the unique attempts to make the house seem alive are very Lacanian), and the two lovely ladies. Sure sure sure, who am I to dare declare the 1963 HAUNTING overrated and as drab as a sunny afternoon wasted watching SOUND OF MUSIC in the gymnasium on the last day of school, followed by watching the music teacher's alternative lifestyle be insinuated in condescending tones by the uptight spinster principal? I'm just a man who escaped that auditorium, who went to the bathroom and never came back.  And now I'm standing before Catherine Zeta-Jones and Lili Taylor as they run, hand-in-hand, through wild dark sets, and at last I'm feeling the grueling slog of a cold wet Monday finally melt off me, as if from a slug of laudanum with a Jaeger chaser. Mmmmm--so dark.... and so gloriously, calorically empty, like the warm glow of a phantom fireplace as imagined by a dying match girl.

The Incredible Melting Marlon (REFLECTION IN A GOLDEN EYE)

"It just occurred to me, you don't believe I want to repent, is that it? Did it ever occur to you that some people might be all repentance and no sin? I may start a mission to help your kind. Come all ye repentants and let us bring a little sin into your lives." -- Sky Masterson (Guys and Dolls)

It's hard to believe the same actor who played Sky Masterson so nimbly in the film version of GUY AND DOLLS would want to suffer through something so repressed as the role of Major Pendleton in REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE (1967). Psychosexually Freudian in the extremis, it's from a time (McCullers wrote it in the 1940s) when there was no 'out' of the closet without beatings and jail time. Repression cooked our great American literature in its egg. The sorrows of life are the joys of art, as Oscar Jaffe would say, and now that we're a lot more socially evolved as a nation, are there really any authors who can crack it wide open like Carson and Tennessee? 

I'd love to love the GOLDEN EYE, as I love most of John Huston's work and it has so many things going for it, but not all Southern Gothic Freudian hothouse pulp has aged as well as as others. The difference between Carson McCullers and her roster of closeted social misfits vs. those of her friend, the great Tennessee Williams, is as sweaty summer when it's too hot to move vs. a cool evening with mint julep and minimal mosquitoes. I'd rather watch Richard Burton swill his way through the scenery in NIGHT OF THE IGUANA for the 37th time than watch Brando soak up the masochistic vapors while his wild stallion wife Liz Taylor (her best line, whispered into Marlon's ear: "Son, were you ever taken out in the street and thrashed by a naked woman?") cavorts with (an equally-unhappily) married (to a bonkers Julie Harris) Lt. Colonel (Brian Keith). Meanwhile a doe-eyed private (Robert Forster) rides naked on her horse and breaks into her room to smell to paw through her underwear while she sleeps. Brando is (of course) in a separate bedroom but he's noticed Forster, and--in his repressed, isolated, sexually frustrated funk, Brando's Major Pendleton mistakes the stalker private's attentions as queer signals towards his own sweaty, obsessive self. Tragedy, of course, ensues. 

There's lots of flustered, coded triangles with old McCullers and her tales of sweaty misbegotten love-starved obsessives, yet for all its litany of perversions and Baby's First Freud symbolism, GOLDEN EYE all rawther airless. The title refers to an idol, unmoving, dead, but all-seeing. Such is the major, or maybe the sun, or, well, you know how dirty double entendres are the very core and existence of the South. Maybe I just don't like it because I was forced to read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in high school and it skeeved, depressed, and annoyed me throughout. I felt a great thirst, as if all my senses had dulled so everything tasted like sulfur-vinegar and there was no air conditioning, and maybe I was depressed and skeeved by my English teacher's weird teeth as she made us all read. But maybe aside from that Pavlovian association, I dislike McCullers because there's never an ecstatic, crazy release-- no urinating on Ms. Fellowe's luggage or iguanas, or cathartic moments where all the masks come off, ala Williams' work.

I guess that's probably my bias because I lurve lurve lurve Tennessee Williams, He would have flushed out the mythic connections for Huston, made the thing a wee clearer, so that the mythic dimension vibrant, relevant, alive with cognizance of mortality and archetypal forces kick down a door and let in in a kind of truth beyond reality. For GOLDEN, the mythic 'eye' component seems like an afterthought, something already dead and only briefly unburied before paraded listlessly around the pasture. The story seems to be content with a through-line of horsey-riding sex symbolism that's almost as overwrought and existentially nauseating as EQUUS. 

Any similarity to the hindquarters of a horse is strictly intentional.

It behooves us to remember how the whole Freud analysis thing had swelled to super hugeness in the 50s,  thanks to the the dawn of suburbia, the space race, and the Kinsey Report. Thanks to freedom from their old world parents, the soldiers and wives in the burbs experienced a robust sexual unbridling, as if a field of horses were un-broken and kicked out the fence to run free and trample any cowboy in the way (or so it seems, I wasn't there). Huston embodied that unbridling in real life before but he loved literature and as a director, depended on the kind of writers (like Williams) who had, as he himself had done, faced oblivion via a war, or bullfighting, or whaling, hunting tigers, or guzzling booze, with a careless shrug. Huston needed a soul able to write the kind of gutsy harpoon-in-the-eye-of-god prose for his own wings to come out. McCullers may have suffered terrible illnesses and a lavender marriage but--if you're all closeted and repressed and horny and sober and sweaty in your little Filipino houseboy-molesting, nipple-mutilating, cocktails-and-hysteria fashion--why even bother setting your mess in a military school at all? And if it's not going to heat to a boil and runneth over into lurid murders and mob violence, why stage it in the deep South? Even Lillian Hellman knew to include those touchstones. For EYE, there's not much to suggest more than a low simmer of surface kinkiness, and-- immediately upon boiling--the film concludes with a weird camera movement and the last lines of the novel (I guess?) plastered over everything. 

And why put Marlon Brando in a role that wastes his talents? Where be his thunderous Marc Antony monologue moment? If you go to the Preakness, do you want to see the best horse just stand still and stare longingly at a carrot? Not that Brando's sad little bits of business at the big 'finally, some gay sex' climax aren't brilliantly underplayed, deeply sad, and bitterly hilarious, but they come too late. And then it ends abruptly with a ghastly bit of repetitive panning camera and onscreen text from the book that tries to be horrific and ironic but is just clumsy.

The eye offends thee, no?

The side cast tries their best to humanize these lurid stock types: Julie Harris, a constant scenery-nibbler, plays the wife who cut off her nipples with garden shears (awhile before the film begins), and who engages in god knows what with her weird Filipino houseboy; together they have turned against her cuckolding military husband (but which came first, the infidelity or the reason?). Brian Keith does okay as the indulgent witness and victim of the conspiratorial bond between this female Prospero and her gay Filipino Ariel (he's fine with it as it allows him to scamper off to rendezvous in the hay with Liz). Forster is appropriately inscrutable and smokin' hot as the underwear-sniffing (straight) bareback rider. 

Brando does have one great termite moment: when he's about to give a lecture on Patton to his gathered cavalry cadets. Suddenly the romance and resonance attached to a great cavalryman like Patton sinks into him and he almost cries, right there in class. For a minute it looks like his whole head is melting down like golden psychedelic spiral sludge. His eyes and lips spread out in a horizontal puddle of darkness and his lips pour over the sides like Donald Duck through a very gradual...  steam....   roller.

Oh Sky, if only you opened that mission....

Great Acid Movies #52: THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR (1970)

The weird thing about acid (and its affiliates) is just how life-changing even one experience can be. If our mind can be likened to a big old Victorian house, most of us just live on the first floor. The basement is locked; the attic and second floor bedrooms boarded up. Who knows if rats or squatters are living there? Better not to open them up just in case. Eventually we become convinced the boarded up doors are just walls. Any attempt to open them just fills us with fear, the whole downstairs seems to quake in separation anxiety --where are you?? Come down this instant!

Then, one night, LSD comes along and kicks open the boarded doors, and unlocks the basement and attic, forcing us through the whole house on a sweeping grand tour. It turns out the rest of the rooms in the house aren't dirty and dusty and empty as we thought - but teeming with art, carpets from distant lands, incense and peppermints. Even if we never see those rooms again after we come back down the stairs, we at least know they're there. If we have a bad trip of course, he shows us the basement, where all the slimy monsters live; but there's another set of stairs there that leads down... to the attic - you come out on top, in a spiritual awakening.

Dogmatic shrinks might tell us those newly discovered rooms are all hallucinations, but honey - until you've tried it, you don't get a vote. If a hallucination seems more real than reality, it's at least worth examining, especially when quantum physics shows us just how impossible true objectivity is. I could tell you Portugal doesn't exist. After all, I've never been there. Bush ran his presidency that way and still got a second term, In fact, the appearance of matter is a hallucination anyway; if we could see the world as it really is we'd see not a chair but a frequency spectrum, vibrating waves...

THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR (1970) operates along this line of philosophy, detailing the way LSD's door-kicking habit disrupts the don't ask/don't tell dysfunctional denial-based cohabitation of the all-American middle class family at the end of the 60s. It strikes me as the sort of film where the writers started out as anti-drug 'there is nothing real beyond the first floor' types, the 'I know every inch of my house so don't ask me what's behind those locked doors because there's nothing behind them, ok? Nothing!' types. But then, in the interest of fairness and perception, the filmmaker/s took acid halfway through preparation for shooting and changed their whole attitude. The result is a film divided. It still has the look and feel of an after-school special coupled to an earthy fly-on-the-wall semi-documentary style (ala say, MEDIUM COOL or ZABRISKIE POINT) but runs a deeper, stranger game. It takes the rare arpproach of truly progressive acid movies, and judges both sides as fucked, and runs off to start a whole new thing, balanced without judgement or condemnation, just trust in one another and the ability to fucking listen to each others' true pain.

Must be we're in Canada.

Eli Wallach and Julie Harris play the Masons, high-strung suburbanite parents of acid-dealing musician Artie (Stephen McHattie) and his naive sister, Maxie (Deborah Winters). After a big fight with the family, Artie gives Maxiee her first trip and her parents later find her freaking out in an upstairs closet. Recognizing symptoms of what they've been reading about in hysteria-mongering tabloids, the whole flock rushes to counseling and then bring it all up the next time they get together with their neighbors, who are steeped in enough adulterous affairs and debauched drinking they're bred to ignore and deny--in clouds of pointless self-righteous indignation--that there's a problem, until the patient therapist finally cracks some ICE STORM-style ice and lets the sunshine in.

That said, for all its acumen, PEOPLE NEXT DOOR can't stop beating a dead horse as far as making sure we compare Wallach's sweaty angry dad constantly validating his right to drink, smoke cigarettes (these are the socially sanctioned choices of their generation) and plow pertinent wives vs. the bladerunning between rock and roll Buddahood and psych ward schizophrenia that is his children's teenage wasteland.

The best moment is at the end, when mom comes to visit Maxie in the psych ward and finally realizes her daughter is actually the sanest one in the family, just unable to let go of her bipolar schizo "act" because she's both stubborn and a bit of a showboat. By opening her mind to admit her own need for wider perspective, mom and daughter are able to reach each other at last.

In the end, THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR is not a condemnation or a celebration, perhaps in that sense it's cinema's most compassionate yet non-corny look at aberrant social behavior until William Blatty's THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980). The moral: LSD can be used as an excuse to avoid responsibility just like any other potentially life-affirming drug or event. Metatextually speaking, the film walks it like it talks it, refusing to go the way of many other cautionary acid tales (i.e. GO ASK ALICE) which fall back on old demonizing myths to generate suspense and pacify the establishment, even if once again the family strengthens itself by ostracizing the father, paving the way for our current plague of either gone or feminized fathers. Now more than ever... we need the 70s dad, for all his sexism and drunken mischief, to return.