He’s a tough creature to destroy. He’s about six feet six inches, looks like the Wolf Man, snarls and growls a lot, and zaps everybody with his lightning bolts. The special effects are so bad, by the way, that at times the lightning bolts do not seem to come from his eyes, or to hit their targets—but never mind, the victims topple over anyway. Gunshots don’t affect the creature, but after he’s set on fire, he disappears in a puff of smoke.
What is this creature? Where does it come from? How to explain its chemistry, its appetites, its violence? Great questions, I guess, for the sequel. The movie ends with a panorama of Los Angeles and a narration assuring us that mankind must always be afraid of the Dark, because in the vastness of the universe, etc., we are like blind men tapping our way into infinity, etc.
One of the amazing things about The Dark is that it’s only about 85 minutes long—short for a feature film, if more than long enough for this one. If they’d gone all the way and shot for 120 minutes, they might have qualified for the most stupefyingly boring movie ever made. Maybe they win that one anyway.
Day of the Dead
(Directed by George Romero; starring Joseph Pilato, Lori Cardille; 1985)
The zombies in Day of the Dead are marvels of special effects, with festoons of rotting flesh hanging from their purple limbs as they slouch toward the camera, moaning their sad songs. Truth to tell, they look a lot better than the zombies in Night of the Living Dead, which was director George Romero’s original zombie film. His technology is improving; perhaps the current emphasis on well-developed bodies (in Perfect, Rambo, etc.) has inspired a parallel improvement in dead bodies.
But the zombies have another problem in Day of the Dead: They’re upstaged by the characters who are supposed to be real human beings. You might assume that it would be impossible to steal a scene from a zombie, especially one with blood dripping from his orifices, but you haven’t seen the overacting in this movie. The characters shout their lines from beginning to end, their temples pound with anger, and they use distracting Jamaican and Irish accents, until we are so busy listening to their endless dialogue that we lose interest in the movie they occupy.
Maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe Romero, whose original movie was a genuine inspiration, hasn’t figured out anything new to do with his zombies. In his second zombie film, the brilliant Dawn of the Dead (1980), he had them shuffling and moaning their way through a modern shopping mall, as Muzak droned in the background and terrified survivors took refuge in the Sears store. The effect was both frightening and satirical. The everyday location made the zombies seem all the more horrible, and the shopping mall provided lots of comic props (as when several zombies tried to crawl up the down escalator).
This time, though, Romero has centered the action in a visually dreary location—an underground storage cavern, one of those abandoned salt mines where they store financial records and the master prints of old movies. The zombies have more or less overrun the surface of America, we gather, and down in the darkness a small team of scientists and military men are conducting experiments on a few captive zombie guinea pigs.
It’s an intriguing idea, especially if Romero had kept the semiseriousness of the earlier films. Instead, the chief researcher is a demented butcher with bloodstained clothes, whose idea of science is to teach a zombie named Bub to operate a Sony Walkman. Meanwhile, the head of the military contingent (Joseph Pilato) turns into a violent little dictator who establishes martial law and threatens to end the experiments. His opponent is a spunky woman scientist (Lori Cardille), and as they shout angry accusations at each other, the real drama in the film gets lost.
In the earlier films, we really identified with the small cadre of surviving humans. They were seen as positive characters, and we cared about them. This time, the humans are mostly unpleasant, violent, insane, or so noble that we can predict with utter certainty that they will survive. According to the mad scientist in Day of the Dead, the zombies keep moving because of primitive impulses buried deep within their spinal columns—impulses that create the appearance of life long after consciousness and intelligence have departed. I hope the same fate doesn’t befall Romero’s zombie movies. He should quit while he’s ahead.
Dead Man
(Directed by Jim Jarmusch; starring Johnny Depp, John Hurt, Robert Mitchum; 1996)
I once traveled for two days from Windhoek to Swakopmund through the Kalahari Desert, on a train without air conditioning, sleeping at night on a hard leather bench that swung down from the ceiling. That journey seemed a little shorter than the one that opens Dead Man, the new film by Jim Jarmusch.
A man named William Blake (Johnny Depp) is traveling from Cleveland, where his parents have just died, to the western town of Machine, where he has been promised a job. He is dressed in a checked suit that looks as if it had been waiting a long time in the menswear store for a sucker to come along. The train drones through the endless prairie. There are shots of the inside of the train. Shots of the view from the train. Shots of the train. Then the train’s soot-faced fireman warns Blake that his grave awaits him in Machine.
For some of my readers the name William Blake will have rung a bell, and they will be wondering if there is any connection between this character and the mystical British poet who died in 1827. There is: They both have the same name. Our Blake has not heard of the English Blake, however, but before long he will run into an Indian named Nobody who can quote him by the yard.
We are getting ahead of the story. Blake arrives in Machine, and reports to the Dickinson Steel Works, a dark satanic mill where he expects to be employed as an accountant. The office manager (John Hurt) explains that the job no longer exists. Blake is appalled; he’s spent his last dime getting there. He confronts the owner of the mill (Robert Mitchum), who stands between a stuffed bear and a portrait of himself, which frame his fearful symmetry. Mitchum brandishes a shotgun and advises Blake to leave.
Blake befriends a hapless flower girl, and is invited to her room for an encounter between innocence and experience. Then the girl’s lover bursts in and shoots her. Blake shoots the man, is shot near the heart, leaps from the window, and flees. We discover the dead man is Dickinson’s son, and the mill owner hires men to track and kill Blake.
The next morning Blake regains consciousness in the forest to find his wound being tended by the Indian named Nobody (Gary Farmer), who was raised by white men, educated in England, and treats Blake as if he really is the poet. The two men now undertake an odyssey, pursued by the killers, in search of Blake’s ultimate destiny, which is revealed as a pleasing cross between the mysticism of the original Blake and the American Indians.
Dead Man is a strange, slow, unrewarding movie that provides us with more time to think about its meaning than with meaning. The black-and-white photography by Robby Muller is a series of monochromes in which the brave new land of the West already betrays a certain loneliness. Farmer brings to the Indian a sweetness and a curious contemporary air (he talks like a New Age guru), and Depp is sad and lost as the opposite of Nobody—which is, I fear, Everyman. A mood might have developed here, had it not been for the unfortunate score by Neil Young, which for the film’s final thirty minutes sounds like nothing so much as a man repeatedly dropping his guitar.
Jim Jarmusch is trying to get at something here, and I don’t have a clue what it is. Are the machines of the east going to destroy the nature of the west? Is the white man doomed, and is the Indian his spiritual guide to the farther shore? Should you avoid any town that can’t use another accountant? Watching the film, I was reminded of the original William Blake’s visionary drawings and haunting poems. Leaving the theater, I came home and took down my Blake and found that the poet had even explained the method of this film: “You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.”