Odds & Ends

Some capsule reviews I've written in the meantime of Hooper's films.  Presented in rough chronology, so the repeating of titles and autobiographical elements within the reviews creates an interesting semi-narrative.

THE FUNHOUSE

Many great horror films are war films, in that they're about two opposing parties facing off in ideological or existential opposition. This is the greatest horror-battle film, half the parties unaware they represent a side in a war and that their actions and strategy (or non-strategy) are outright effecting the fate of their respective brothers-in-arms. The subtext is made into the text, which is the subtext, and this is through seeing these structures while the characters never do. The sound design is the ultimate piece completing the Gesamtkunstwerk here (and this should be played loud), as background dialogue, whispered back-and-forth, and repeated whimpers fill out the ever-strategizing, ever-blinkering, of an eternal war.

THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE

This is not a film of exposition, but more a series of scenic warning signs. There is no attempt to create a comprehensive view of our characters and we do not get to know them, they are merely the human figures in a film made up of cautionary events, conceived in Hooper and Henkel's liberally-dispersed and more writerly gestures, incarnate in Hooper's deliberate invention that determines gesture as just that. So extreme are its depictions of irrational terror and social entropy that it forgoes its claims to naturalism early on, tapping into underlying structures and artful syncopation that work on you at a subconscious level, much like a fairy-tale that knows what information to give out and what of its story to truncate and remix. Sally running into a branch leading to an extended moment of disorientation is the point at which the film no longer seems to wish to hide its claims to artifice. Like Hooper's double-window-jumping, the branch is clearly contrived, not to throw an extra jolt in but to support the three-pronged journey Sally embarks on (once her and Franklin enter the woods), acting as a final consecrating indignity - one at a final station of the cross - before the plot can move forward. Only Hooper can make a chaotic chase through a nettled copse geographically and structurally coherent, and Hooper does this because he has established the old Franklin house, he's established the Sawyer house - Sally's journey within it, itself, is an up-down-up structured movement - he establishes the gas station (using incredible tracking shots), and he never introduced that branch. I also noted the "humor" of the scene where Sally is finally brought into the Sawyer house as a captive, of which Hooper has often expressed feeling disappointed when audiences would be too terrified to catch on to that humor. It is less outright humor, though, than it is the sharpness of his editing and the rhythm he finds in the three cannibals' interactions, and I think Hooper knew this. He was not making a comedy, but he was making a hyper-observant portrait of inter-social behavior. The dinner scene is the apex of all of Hooper's ideas of the death-image, but he also shows remarkable dramatic continuity even amidst the chaos. I like how Leatherface is often quite peripheral in the scene, and it is only when Sally is not explicitly facing off with the Hitch-Hiker, who engages her the most directly and the most cruelly, providing the bulk of the drama in the scene, that Leatherface finally gets his moment with a repeat motion, silently creeping toward Sally, a curious hulk seen only through Sally's craning POV. 

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2

Feels rushed in the making, but if L.G.’s holy-coded denouement and Jesus arc doesn’t suggest simply another Tobe Hooper passion play, then I’m moved for nothing.

POLTERGEIST

100% Hooper. Spielberg would never make this awkward, slow, imagistic, and bogged-down-by-images (and pauses, and rhythmic digressions) of a film. The story and script are nonsense, this is merely an experiment in narrative storytelling. Spielberg's pretense of narrative through an emotive frivolity is undone by Hooper's seriousness with everything that juxtaposes unnaturalness in supposedly prescribed relationships. Alternately, Spielberg allows Hooper to divest himself of all his worries about the make-up of the family. Imagine Poltergeist without the kidnapping, its inciting, heroism-precipitating incident, and you would be close to Hooper's original conception of Poltergeist: a family lives next to a cemetery, small nuisance-like poltergeist activity occurs, and it ends in a chaotic finale in which a hidden history reveals itself in wagon wheels emerging from the mud. In the first act you feel the traces of this film. The story is told through magic tricks with the camera, not the coherence of the plot - the chair stacking is something you would see right out of Hooper’s Eggshells. Even after the imposition of narrative stakes, the film is a structureless procession of narrative stoppages, filled with pauses and performative silences (just think of the final shot). Hooper makes a set-piece even of a parents’ joint session, Hooper being the only one who can stage believably the rambling of two high individuals and in this realism, create a unified set piece out of a duet of performances. This is filled with visually-stimulated nothing-stretches; shorthand narrative; long form situationism. Hooper’s capacity for reframing is something he shares with Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a form of storytelling that is not in the content on the surface, not the telling of story (no matter how much they protest that idea), but framing and then subtle reframing, mining an always-drama, an always-characterization, in the very manner in which a story is told, or more accurately, an existence is circumscribed. Every Spielberg trope - the foreground-background placement, the one take, even the camera push into faces of awe - is noticeably different from Spielberg’s usage in the inseparable context of Hooper’s creation of imagist set-pieces, divorcing these techniques from narrative, embedding it in Hooper’s awkward handcraft, his naturalist set-piecing. It is most satisfying as a Frankenstein creature, a film not to have a soul of its own, but to mock the idea of life by the brazen networking of its parts. As a narrative, it is an ungainly creature, but as Hooper’s dissociated networking of parts, it is a comment on the acute sentience of his creation nevertheless. Tangina’s very long debriefing on "the Beast" is not in the original script. What neuronal mishap of elongating this film’s anti-plot was it that provoked that rewrite? 

TOOLBOX MURDERS

It might be cliche for me to reevaluate a Hooper film and inevitably give it a higher rating, but Toolbox Murders is as pure and uncluttered, unproblematic, an expression of Hooper's long, novelistic game as anything. The screening was preceded by outpourings of fondness, gratefulness, and admiration for the infinitely disarming, idiosyncratic, and eccentric Hooper: I heard Danny Pearl express his gratefulness for being given his career, Amanda Plummer in awe of a man she had cherished (telling the story of Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Tobe Hooper deep in an exchange upon meeting - as he was loved by all the Japanese genre filmmakers - and realizing the two men looked identical), Toolbox AD Andrew Zimmerman speak of Hooper's down-home sagacity shooting in the tricky Ambassador Hotel and the "magic" inevitable on a Hooper set. Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Dickerson, his dearest confidantes, who looked on him like a child, Tom Holland bloviating endearingly about his quirks in their Autumn friendship and his coming over with a copy of Djinn and pouring over every frame with them, Mick Garris bowing out on a brief Poltergeist flare-up when overcome with feelings, but recommending everyone just listen to the podcast episode he did that broached the subject as he was there and saw it all. Toolbox Murders in 35mm and theatrical sound (who knew the score was so meticulous and constant?) is definitely giving it the respect it deserves. It may move like an Argento or Polanski film, give or take, but in 35mm it looks and feels more like Hooper's Tsai Ming-Liang film. I report this in a journalistic capacity, not as an impinging on the personal stories of those closest to him. This is for posterity and the record. 

EATEN ALIVE

"As I heard the story in the paper the next day... my tears came tumbling down." 

"What do you want me to do? Throw myself to the alligators?" 

Yes, this movie answers, that is what most men want women to do, as embodied by William Finley's emotionally erratic pater familias. 

"I said git and git. I made the signal. I told ya and I told ya and I told ya. You come in here and you go in there, ruttin' and ruttin'. You think I don't know?" 

Blistering. Also, contrary to how it may come off at first, carefully considered (as "adapted for the screen" by Kim Henkel), despite the limitations of its making. The events of the film ensue because the monkey (and all its primate functions) dies, and only the reptile Id is left. This may not reach the intensity and razor intelligence of Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but this is because it is an entirely different animal: a studio picture, a work of fantasy, a lush piece of theater and a melodrama filled with emotions and sentiment (to the degree such a compromised work of grindhouse filmmaking can) - not a cunningly pointed piece of faux-guerilla filmmaking. Yet these are two films united by the ferocity and vision of their artist (and their shared look at madness), two very different projects finding overlap simply in the youthful inspiration and joie de vivre of their hard-working creator: works put together by an artisanal hand, as if by the skin of their teeth, for each cut and each moment of dramatic montage is welded into the thing as if its life depended on it. Hooper's hybridizing of studio-set artifice and the expressionistic run-and-gun inspiration of his previous film is truly something to marvel at, for we get the expressive cynicism of 'Chain Saw' tied to the mournful, non-cynical gestures of melodrama. Melodrama, at least in its most sophisticated form, has always been a genre of intense detail, and Eaten Alive provides it in gently preponderant ways: a preponderance of arresting subplots, for instance Libby Wood's lovelorn projection onto Stuart Whitman's sheriff no clearer than today with Crystin Sinclair's performance writ large in 35mm; the blood-smudged side of the veranda where Judd's mopping would be less effective, lying just below a clueless Buck's line of sight before he becomes croc bait; the evolution of victims, from Roy to Harvey Wood to Buck, all a lineage of masculinity, but Harvey's stoicism and Buck's belligerence and sexual odiousness alleviated by their growing rational awareness of the imperiled child underneath, each acting more humanly just as Judd ratchets up in villainy and madness. Quoted above is Judd's menacing exhortations to a distracted Buck, as he tries to locate the sounds of the little girl below, and it is a collection of phrases Judd has said at various prior points in the film. This moment is the condensation of Judd's mania, the novel serial killer who has no motivation but to reflect the victim's status right back at them, as refracted through an opaque glass (that is Judd) of PTSD, sexual neurosis, an unchecked sort of libertarianism (distrust of authority), and retrograde barbarity. He circles behind Buck in three paces, spouting these toxic Tantra, warnings to Buck and self-pity for himself. All of it results in anger. The film's details go on, and accumulate, combined in a film that is almost as immersive and in control as Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and that is the sign of a filmmaker who would never stop crafting his work (until it was taken away from him). Even the cramped chase sequences with Angie under the floorboards are more than meets the eye, slyly crafted bravura bouts of impressionist suspense. I love how it ends its playlist of radio songs - up to that point pure American Countrypolitan - with a Spanish Mariachi song. Suffering is a universal language. Vixen Lynette saves the day. Judd's demise is a triumphant end to a work of clear structure. 

POLTERGEIST

This kind of sucks in supersized 35mm. The film is returned back to its commercial purposes, its sensory overload context, every shot no longer a rarefied decision but simply what needed to be shot to get a film up on the screen at all. The film's theology is so populist and middling. It's just like Gremlins and The Goonies, serious (to varying degrees) filmmakers trying their best to cohere (or, better yet, "incohere") committee-written pop nonsense. The goth nonsense here curdles when mysterious strings accompany the reveal that you are, in fact, living on top of a cemetery. The mechanics of the production show their extreme laboriousness, every close-up surely its own hurdle while Goldsmith’s score is simply used to cover-up Hooper’s quick work and inattention to detail. It's a testament to Hooper's wayward train, which this certainly is - read the script, look at the preliminary storyboards, and see a film barely going by plan - that the experience of going to see the "new Spielberg production" feels less like a visit to the toy store and more like getting trapped in a toy store elevator for two hours with one genuine mystic and one ad man. Saying Spielberg was entirely happy with what ended up on the screen is akin to Hollywood revisionism, where Spielberg-hype fantasy overtakes a grim, frankly sloppy reality ("Can't we 'zazz this up a bit, Tobe?" "No Steven, just shoot it in wide shots, your energy tires me.")... Viewed in 35mm right in the center of Tinsel Town, call the experience, and it was kind of like traveling back in time, ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOOPERWOOD. 

EATEN ALIVE

"It's much more complex than it seems. I tried to establish some kind of motif that carries throughout the show - sometimes that's actually more important than what you're actually showing. This has a lot to do with lights and shadows: it takes place in a single night, from dusk to dawn. And all the characters bring with them some sort of history, they're not just cardboard characters walking into a slaughterhouse." - Tobe Hooper

I'm no longer convinced of its formal elements, a little too diluted by cinematographer Caramico's hastiness, a little too unfixed on Hooper's fixation on lamps as indifferent beacons of our everyday living, and on decoration (his interest hardly allowed to let flourish until Poltergeist); a little too, dare I venture the idea, slick in its horrific and atmospheric affects - the roiling fog, the canted Freudian insert-shots that glimpse the gator, and so on and so forth. There is a cohesive design and digestible shape here that gets in the way of the film of pure suggestion I have touted. But the film has ceased to become a rational object of evaluation for me, instead it has become a series of accidents and incremental details, and a spirit that defies my increased scrutiny with every revisit (Why didn't he center this shot better? Why didn't he move on this one? Why didn't he hold on this shot longer? It is the peril of being the aficionado), defies the bourgeoisie comfort blanket of hard "decisions" being always, constantly, made. This is a film of suggestion, because I am no longer in charge of the effect it has on me, even as I criticize it. The affective discharge I get in my synapses when I hear the mariachi song that closes the film is ten times greater than the lack of a point in certain prior shots, or the mechanics it may indulge in. This is a film of melancholy, even as it never makes a point of its melancholy. Remember that film Babel? This has the effect that that film desperately wants to achieve (about melancholy and interconnectivity) through constant making a point of it. I'd rather not know what I'm heading into, and this is the magic of Hooper's sense of cinema.

POLTERGEIST

No discernible thematic center, but still a strange, untangled object made of so much hobbled-together uncanny parts, set in a house that doesn't look like a house but a studio set and may be the last hold-out of studio soundstage artifice in a film that wasn't outwardly trying to create such the effect (such as One From the Heart). The ghostly woman descending the stairs is a leading example of a scene that was forced into cohesion, filmed without an idea of what was actually coming down the stairs. Hooper filmed it any which way and may have removed all purpose from the scene. The characters stare at it and it disappears (no one screams like in the script); a true scene that defies sense. Hooper only cared about the image (a wide shot of the living room, characters dispersed into all four corners, the top of the stairs and a hanging lamplight) and it was hobbled into cohesion at a later date with the filming of the ghost (and its equally unhelpful video capture). Defying pragmatic usage, it is not suspenseful, nor consequential, nor particularly elaborate or impressive a set-piece - those things are the domain of Spielberg - but it is emblematic of Poltergeist as a film of parts, schizophrenic and hobbled and rickety and two voices battling it out, Spielberg's sensibleness and Hooper's curiousness and openness, for the way things may not come together as a whole.

DOWN FRIDAY STREET

I try not to be too hyperbolic about a short documentary that is as shaggy, messy, thematically undefined, and unassiduously untempered aesthetically as all of Hooper’s other work, but if you are looking for that connecting thread between the curiously precise classicalist concerns of Hooper’s slapstick period piece The Heisters and the New Wave, timely-concerned vérité phase begun with Eggshells, this is the film for you. Houses Also Die, you can call it, and if it’s not in Hooper’s vocabulary to mount a discourse on race and anthropology, then we can at least expect the same introverted, phobic interests in mood, zones, the ghostly aspects of change and time; experimental techniques melded with his governing interest in the grounded aspects of a story to be told (here, of stately old WASP houses being razed for parking lots). A sharp dip into an almost-refined antiquity for a filmmaker who usually concerns himself with ardent, corrupted civilization (not “society,” as Hooper is either concerned with individuals themselves or the structure at large, at a nominal scale rather than a precise one - his observations on specific social groups often weaker than what is gathered when these subcultures merely stand in for larger issues). This is Hooper’s most withdrawn, well-bred film, into an interior world of objects; his truest occult film (a subject he would subsequently show interest in), for the objects are left to exist throughout divorced from human hands and presence (which Hooper's films of object-space idée fixe naturally betray, with characters). This is Tobe Hooper’s The Haunting of Hill House. It’s Hooper’s closest to a structuralist film, and he’s come close due to his miraculous instincts even in his narrative features. Rustic, region-specific Profit Motives and the Whispering Wind (Gianvito, 2007), give way to Michael Snow, give way to Kurosawa’s Pulse and, as mentioned, Shirley Jackson (and her antisocial libertarian, quasi-satirical takes on the commercialism running roughshod over a bygone, gothic hominess), and the seeds of hints are planted for borrowings - straight-on reiteration of techniques, a kingly lineage of fated self-plagiarism - in Eggshells, Poltergeist, and Djinn.