Kazaam
(Directed by Paul M. Glaser; starring Shaquille O’Neal, Francis Capra; 1996)
Kazaam is a textbook example of a filmed deal, in which adults assemble a package that reflects their own interests and try to sell it to kids. How else to explain a children’s movie where the villains are trying to steal a bootleg recording so they can sell pirated copies of it? What do kids know, or care, about that?
The movie stars Shaquille O’Neal, the basketball player, as Kazaam, a genie who is released from captivity in an old boom box, and has to perform three wishes for a little kid (Francis Capra). Right there you have a wonderful illustration of the movie’s creative bankruptcy. Assigned to construct a starring vehicle for Shaq, the filmmakers looked at him, saw a tall bald black man, and said, “Hey, he can be a genie!” At which point, somebody should have said, “Okay, that’s level one. Now let’s take it to level three.”
Shaq has already proven he can act (in Blue Chips, the 1994 movie about college basketball). Here he shows he can be likable in a children’s movie. What he does not show is good judgment in his choice of material; this is a tired concept, written by the numbers. Kids old enough to know about Shaq as a basketball star will be too old to enjoy the movie. Younger kids won’t find much to engage them. And O’Neal shouldn’t have used the movie to promote his own career as a hopeful rap artist; the sound track sounds less like music to entertain kids than like a trial run for a Shaq album.
The plot: A wrecking ball destroys an old building, releasing a genie who is discovered by a kid named Max (Capra). The rules are, he gets three wishes. The twist is, the genie doesn’t much like people, having made no friends in 5,000 years and having spent most of that time cooped up in bottles, lamps, radiators, etc. The other twist is, the kid doesn’t much trust people, because his father has disappeared.
The genie, however, helps the kid find his father, only to find out the father is involved in an illegal music pirating operation. The father is not quite ready to go straight, but eventually, after some action sequences involving an evil gang, he realizes that his future depends on living up to his son’s expectations.
Uncanny, how much this plot resembles Aladdin and the King of Thieves, a Disney made-for-video production. In that one, Aladdin has never known his father, but an oracle in an old lamp tells him where the father is to be found, and the helpful blue genie helps him go there. His father is the King of the Thieves, it turns out, and may not be entirely ready to go straight. But after some action sequences involving the evil gang of thieves, the father realizes that he must live up to his son’s expectations, etc.
Did anybody at Disney notice they were making the same movie twice, once as animation, once as live action? Hard to say. The animated movie at least has the benefit of material that fits the genre, much better songs, a colorful graphic style, and another outing for the transmogrifying genie with the voice by Robin Williams. Kazaam, on the other hand, by being live action, makes the bad guys too real for the fantasy to work, and the action sequence feels just like the end of every other formula movie where the third act is replaced by fires and fights.
There are several moments in the movie when fantasy and reality collide. One comes when the genie astonishes the kid with a roomful of candy, which cascades out of thin air. I was astonished, too. Astonished that this genie who had been bottled up for most of the last 5,000 years would supply modern off-the-shelf candy in its highly visible commercial wrappers: M&M’s, etc. Does the genie’s magic create the wrappers along with the candy, or does the genie buy the candy at wholesale before rematerializing it?
There is also the awkwardness of the relationship between the genie and the kid, caused by the need to make Kazaam not only a fantasy figure, but also a contemporary pal who can advise the kid, steer him straight, and get involved in the action at the end. Genies are only fun in the movies if you define and limit their powers. That should have been obvious, but the filmmakers didn’t care to extend themselves beyond the obvious commercial possibilities of their first dim idea. As for Shaquille O’Neal, given his own three wishes the next time, he should go for a script, a director, and an interesting character.
Lair of the White Worm
(Directed by Ken Russell; starring Amanda Donohue, Hugh Grant; 1988)
Let this much be said for Ken Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm: This movie provides you with exactly what you would expect from a movie named The Lair of the White Worm. It has a lair, it has a worm, the worm is white, and there is a sufficient number of screaming victims to be dragged down into the lair by the worm.
Russell provides you with your money’s worth. Why he would have wanted to make this film is another matter. This is the kind of movie that Roger Corman was making for American-International back in the early 1960s, when AIP was plundering the shelves of out-of-copyright horror tales, looking for cheap story ideas. Corman would have found The Lair of the White Worm on the shelf right next to Dracula; both books were written by the same strange man, Bram Stoker.
In losing a juicy early-1960s AIP horror movie, we have gained a juicy late-1980s horror movie that would probably seem better if Russell’s name were not connected to it. People expect something special from Ken Russell, whose inflamed filmography includes such items as Women in Love, The Music Lovers, The Devils, The Boyfriend, Tommy, Altered States, Crimes of Passion, and Salome’s Last Dance. Every one of Russell’s films have been an exercise in wretched excess. Sometimes it works. Russell loves the bizarre, the Gothic, the overwrought, the perverse. The strangest thing about The Lair of the White Worm is that, by his standards, it is rather straight and square.
The movie begins on an archaeological dig in the wilds of Scotland, where a curious fossil is discovered, a fossil that seems neither man nor beast, nor reptile, for that matter, and yet contains aspects of more than one species. What does the skull represent? That is an assignment for young Angus Flint, who has the perfect name for an archaeologist, and who has made his find in the barnyard of the Trent sisters, Mary and Eve. Eventually, Flint discovers some of the family history. The Trent girls lost their father when he disappeared during a spelunking expedition in a nearby cave. And local tradition has it that the medieval lord of the area once slew a giant dragon.
Anyone who has ever seen a horror film can carry on unassisted from here; no prizes for reaching the end before Ken Russell. The skull obviously belongs to a race of giant dragons, or worms, and one of them quite possibly devoured the late Mr. Trent down in that cave. Russell introduces us to two more characters, and the chase is on. One of them is Lord James D’Ampton, descendant of the dragon-slayer. The other is Lady Sylvia Marsh, who dresses like a tasteful Elvira and lives in the moldering Gothic mansion down the lane.
More than this I will not tell. No, not even to hint that the worm of Stone Rigg Cavern can manifest itself in human form. Certainly not that. What I will say for The Lair of the White Worm is that this is a respectable B-grade monster movie, more tame and civilized than the Mad Slasher movies that have all but destroyed the genre. It has everything you want: shadows, screams, feverish scientific speculations, guttering candle flames, flowing diaphanous gowns, midnights, dawns, and worms. Ken Russell was once, and no doubt will be again, considered an important director. This is the sort of exercise he could film with one hand tied behind his back, and it looks like that was indeed more or less his approach.