Entry 124: Nomads (1986)

Nomads (1986)

Dir: John McTiernan

"If you've never been frightened by anything, you will be frightened by this."

 

This is a rare occasion, folks; a BoS entry that you can safely watch with the missus!  So grab a bottle of red wine, buy a nice bouquet of roses and cuddle up down in the Basement of Sleaze for Nomads!

After a ranting, raving French anthropologist (Pierce Brosnan, TV's Remington Steel, the fifth James Bond) dies under her watch in the emergency room, Los Angeles M.D. Lesley-Anne Down (Countess Dracula, The Great Train Robbery) begins experiencing hallucinatory visions of his life shortly before his demise.  Brosnan specialized in documenting the lives and customs of nomadic tribespeople and had moved with his wife (Anna Maria Monticelli, The Dark Room, Silver City) to settle down and take a teaching job.  As Down begins to question her sanity, through her visions we see how Brosnan and Monticelli were menaced by some punk rocker-looking delinquents (including New Wave rock legend Adam Ant Mary Woronov from Eating Raoul and Rock n Roll High School) in a black van who seemed drawn to their home because it had been the scene of a brutal murder some time ago.  In the past, Brosnan discovers that the figures menacing him don't show up on film and that they are, in fact, a group of restless, nomadic souls, all of whom had died violent deaths and feel compelled to assault the living.  Brosnan attempts to confront them, sealing his doom while, in the future, Down and Monticelli flee Los Angeles, but not before being chased by a mysterious, spectral biker whose identity (the last shot of the film) shocks them both.

Despite it's outlandish tagline, Nomads isn't remotely scary.  In fact, it isn't really even a horror film.  Rather, it's a simplified, filmic version of the "dark urban fantasy" genre that would later be favored and popularized in literature by Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman.  Nomads has a great, dreamy 80's music video look and, in it's action sequences, McTiernan showcases some of the visceral edge he would mine to great effect in his next two films, Predator and Die Hard.  The performances, if not revelatory, are at least solid and the whole cast seems to be putting their best foot forward (Brosnan's French accent takes a bit of getting used to and is never entirely convincing).  The problem with the film is that McTiernan (who wrote as well as directed) chooses to sacrifice substance for style and pacing and, in so doing, turns out a film that makes no goddamn sense.  We're never told (or even shown) how, exactly, Brosnan's memories are transferred to Down after she witnesses his death, nor are the rules by which the "nomads" operate (how do they come back from the dead?  Why?  Can just anyone become a nomad?).  The film alternately implies that they're Inuit spirits that have followed Brosnan from a previous expedition AND that they're actually drawn to Brosnan's home because of it's violent history and that he's just a victim of circumstance.  This lack of defined rules for the supernatural characters makes the film's final scene, meant to be shocking, kind of silly and nonsensical.  Oh yeah, about halfway through the film, Brosnan meets a blind nun (Frances Bay, Twin Peaks' Mrs. Tremond) in an abandoned building and has a cryptic conversation with her before suddenly being menaced by a whole gaggle of writhing, rotting and half-naked nuns in a sequence that looks like an outtake from a metal video and has no real relation to anything else in the film.  If The Bros gets you all hot and bothered, take note that he has a surprising full-frontal nude scene here (which seems to be the sole reason for the film's R rating).  For you music enthusiasts, Nomads DOES feature a GREAT score by Bill Conti (Rocky, I, The Jury), with some screamin' electric guitar provided by Ted Nugent, PLUS the Nuge himself appears in a cameo as one of the Nomads!  To review, Nomads looks and sounds great and is never boring, but it makes no sense whatsoever.  Also, it's tame enough that you should feel free to watch it with a non-horror fan.  That's all.   

Entry 123: The Dark (1979)

The Dark (1979)

Dir: John "Bud" Cardos

"A Chilling Tale of Alien Terror."

 

Hi, and welcome back to the Basement of Sleaze.  I know it's been a month since my last entry; I'm working on making a few changes around here that will hopefully help me to be more prolific and...

"DARKNESS!  THE DARK!"

Who the fuck said that?  Weird.  Anyway, as I was saying...

"THE DARK!  DARKNESS!"

Alright, that's gonna get fucking irritating.  Y'know, maybe I should...

"DARKNESS!  THE DARK!"

Y'know what?  Fuck it.  On to the entry.

After a tacked-on (more on that later) prologue in which an alien spacecraft crashes to earth while an uncredited narrator (whose voice you'll recognize from every 80s/early-90s action movie trailer) warns us that a visit from an extraterrestrial being is both very likely to occur and very unlikely to be pleasant, a cute blonde is brutally murdered while leaving a movie theatre playing The Night Child and BoS favorite Beyond the Door.  It turns out that her father is William Devane (Rolling Thunder, Marathon Man), a hard-assed, Norman Mailer-inspired novelist who's just gotten out of the slammer for killing a man he caught nailing his wife.  The police are baffled by the girl's disintegrated head and the skin cells left behind by the killer, which seem to indicate he has a grey complexion (this is explained to us by "special guest star" Casey goddamn Kasem, playing a crime lab pathologist).  To make matters worse, the lead on the investigation is veteran cop Richard Jaeckel (Grizzly, Starman), who happens to be the cop that put Devane away for manslaughter!  As corpses killed in a similar fashion begin to pile up (including a horny old black guy, some would-be vigilantes and a mugger), Devane begins looking into the murders himself and hooks up with plucky reporter Cathy Lee Crosby (Coach, TV's original Wonder Woman), who has been covering the murders for the local news.  In the climax, Devane and Crosby form an uneasy alliance with Jaeckel and his cops to confront the killer in an old warehouse.  The killer, of course, turns out to be a muscular alien who can shoot laser from his eyes capable of both levitating and disintegrating people!  You'll begin to doubt your sanity as this alien creep uses his eye beams and brute strength to chuck cops around like rag dolls until Devane lights him on fire and he explodes (!).  Oh, I didn't even mention that the creature shares an unexplained psychic link with a crazy old lady named De Renzy (Jacquelyn Hyde, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Going Ape!), who helps our heroes track down the killer and moves in and out of the story with little explanation.  Yeesh.

This movie's a big mess, folks.  It started out, under original director Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Poltergeist), as a zombie movie about a long-dead murderer rising from the grave to kill again on the eve of the 100th anniversary of his death.  Hooper was fired by producer DICK FUCKING CLARK (yes, the American Bandstand/Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve host) for being "too slow and artsy" and was replaced with the infinitely faster/less talented Cardos (Kingdom of the Spiders, Gor II).  THEN, nearing the end of production, Clark and his cohorts caught wind of this new movie Alien coming from Fox and decided by beating it to the punch by changing the killer from a zombie to an alien.  As there wasn't time to reshoot the whole film, they simply tacked on the awkward prologue and reworked/refilmed a few of the death scenes, adding the clumsily-rotoscoped laser eye-beams in post.  The result is a very standard, mostly forgettable piece of late-night schlock with a couple of fairly suspenseful sequences, particularly a scene where Crosby's boss Keenan Wynn (Dr. Strangelove, Once Upon a Time in the West) is menaced by the killer in a silent parking garage.

There are, however, two REALLY memorable aspects to The Dark.  First is the presence of Devane, a severely undervalued character actor who appears here in a rare leading man role.  As an actor, Devane's always intense and committed, and his (often bizarre) performance here is a joy to behold, whether he's mouthing off casually to the cops or belching uncontrollably during his daughter's autopsy.  Plus, he looks fucking rad prowling the streets of nighttime of L.A. with his shaggy '70s hair, aviator shades and black leather jacket.  Also, the movie has a ridiculous/awesome score by Roger Kellaway (Evilspeak), in which sinister synth lines are punctuated by an uncredited male vocalist hissing

"DARKNESS!  THE DARK!"

every time a victim is being menaced by the alien.  You...really need to experience it for yourself.

A couple more random points before I sign off.  Interestingly, The Dark features a couple of elements that would be co-opted by later, better movies.  The spaceship crashing to earth at the film's opening is shot almost exactly the same as similar openings in The Thing (1982) and Predator (1987) and Crosby's TV newswoman on the hunt for a serial killer on the streets of L.A. might well have influenced Dee Wallace's VERY similar character in The Howling (1981).  Oh yeah, keep an eye out for Tubbs himself, Phillip Michael Thomas, in a brief appearance as a bare-chested street kid.