Nowhere to Run
(Directed by Robert Harmon; starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Rosanna Arquette; 1993)
I am trying to remember where I saw Nowhere to Run before, but I have forgotten—just as, before too much longer, I will have forgotten Nowhere to Run itself. This is the kind of movie that is so witlessly generic that the plot and title disappear into a mist of other recycled plots and interchangeable titles.
If you have seen the ads on TV, you already know everything that happens in the movie. A prisoner (Jean-Claude Van Damme) escapes from a prison bus and ends up camping on the farm of a sexy widow (Rosanna Arquette) and her two young children, including Kieran Culkin, brother of the little superstar. At first Arquette wants him to leave, but no sooner has he said nineteen words, which are a lot for him, than attraction begins to grow between them.
Meanwhile, an evil real estate developer (Joss Ackland) has designs on the idyllic valley wherein nestles Arquette’s farm. He wants to bulldoze her out, and replace this Eden with suburban sprawl. She resists, and he enlists hired goons and the corrupt local lawman (who is smitten with Arquette) to strong-arm her off the land. Van Damme comes to her rescue, and after assorted barn-burnings, pitchfork stabbings, knife fights, gun battles, motorcycle chases, and bulldozer duels, victory is distributed among the just, while the evil are carted away, sneering, “Don’t you know who I am?”
Van Damme has specialized in kickboxing and martial arts pictures up until now, but Nowhere to Run gives him a few quiet conversational scenes—almost too quiet, since he seems reluctant to speak up. Rosanna Arquette is rather thanklessly used in the film, but shows a quiet grace that should have served a better script. After Van Damme wins her over by repairing the farm machinery, befriending her children, saving her life, and letting her see him in the shower, the erotic tension builds until she finally cracks and utters the movie’s best line: “Want to see what my room looks like?”
The movie’s screenplay includes a contribution by Joe Eszterhas, author of Basic Instinct and Jagged Edge. I have a feeling this one was in the bottom of the desk drawer for a long time.
Oh Heavenly Dog
(Directed by Joe Camp; starring Chevy Chase, Benji, Jane Seymour, Omar Sharif, Robert Morley, Alan Sues; 1980)
Satire has such a curious way of catching up with itself. Just a few short years ago, Chevy Chase was on Saturday Night Live, that sworn enemy of our national tendency toward the smarmy. Now Chevy Chase is playing Benji in a movie. Among the great unrecorded conversations in Hollywood history, we must now include the one in which Chevy Chase’s agent convinced him that playing Benji would be the right career move.
The conversation itself could no doubt have played on Saturday Night Live, and there’d also be endless possibilities for the ads: You’ll believe a man can bark! Just when we thought it was safe to go back into the pond!
Oh Heavenly Dog is not, alas, anywhere near as funny as the thoughts it inspires. It’s a total miscalculation from beginning to end, inspired by an idiotic decision to increase the average age of the Benji audience by starring him in a movie rated PG. Let’s face it. Movie audiences have a certain set of expectations for any movie starring a trained dog, and no mere PG rating is going to inspire hopes for greater wit, sophistication, and maturity. There is only so much you can do with a dog.
And Oh Heavenly Dog does most of it. In this movie, you’ll see Benji dial a telephone, open drawers, go through files, jump into cars, snuggle up to a beautiful girl, jump into her bubble bath and (oh, you PG!) bury his wet, black little nose in her cleavage. The possibilities for Benji in an R-rated movie are too depressing to consider.
The movie’s plot crossbreeds the original Benji formula with a whodunit murder mystery and several scenes inspired by Heaven Can Wait. The film begins with Chevy Chase in human form, as a London private eye who’s called in on a new case. He makes a house call, discovers a corpse, and is immediately stabbed in the back by a mysterious stranger.
The stabbing scene incorporates a movie device I detest: We only see the shoes, pants, coat, etc., of the killer, as he stabs our hero. Since the camera could obviously show us his identity but doesn’t, we’re being set up for a cheap, dumb revelation scene in the end. Since the thriller genre depends absolutely on the solution of mysteries set up early in the story, it’s infuriating to get shots suggesting that the camera knows who did it, but isn’t telling.
Anyway. Chevy Chase dies, goes to heaven, and is processed by a Mr. Higgins, who informs him that he can redeem his sinful record on Earth by going back and solving the original murder. The only catch is, he’ll have to go back as a dog. So the movie continues with Benji bouncing around while his thoughts are spoken on the sound track in Chevy Chase’s voice.
This premise could have been fun if the filmmakers had used imagination in exploring the fantasy of a man in a dog’s body: The whole problem of surviving in an out-scale environment has been shown entertainingly in movies such as The Incredible Shrinking Man. But no. Benji is such a cute little tyke that realities aren’t allowed to intrude, and Oh Heavenly Dog becomes another one of those insufferable movies in which the plot grinds to a dead halt while the trained dog does his tricks. You know: A-ha! The dead woman is connected in some way with the art gallery! Now let’s watch Benji pick up a pencil in his teeth and dial the telephone!
Every scene in the movie is directed at the same deadening crawl, most of the dialogue is delivered in a dispirited monotone, and the solution to the mystery, when it comes, is shatteringly uninteresting. Even the happy ending isn’t so happy. The human female that Benji falls in love with is reincarnated and sent back to Earth as a cat. The music swells on the sound track, and Benji and the cat rub sensuously against each other. My own cat, who knows a great deal about the sex lives of cats, says spending his nights in the sack with a dog is not his idea of a happy ending.
Old Dracula
(Directed by Clive Donner; starring David Niven, Teresa Graves; 1975)
In addition to the other, more distinguished, roles he was born to play, David Niven was all but made for Count Dracula. Who else could summon up quite the same combination of weary charm and seedy elegance? And who else, rising from the neck of his latest victim, his fangs dripping blood, could observe that it used to be a lot easier to get a decent meal in the old days—you just sent out for something from the neighborhood.
Such reflections lure us into Old Dracula with, well, fairly high expectations, anyway. The movie’s obviously intended as a rip-off of Young Frankenstein, right down to the artwork in the ads. But the presence of David Niven is encouraging, and so is the identity of the director: Clive Donner, who, back in the days of Swinging London, made such films as What’s New, Pussycat?
So nothing quite prepares us for the mess to follow. Niven does, indeed, keep his cool; he may be slumming but he never acts as if he knows it. But the rest of the cast—and Donner—don’t seem to have a clue as to why they’re making this movie, or how they want us to respond.
There are laughs, but they come either from isolated lines of dialogue or from the sheer incoherence of the plot. There are thrills—or, more accurately, there is one thrill, a fairly boring one as horror-film thrills go. (Will the heroine get trapped in the well with the rats and the rising water?) And there’s a great deal of fang-sinking. (The press booklet informs us that Niven’s fangs were supplied by a top London dentist: Were they covered by the National Health Service?)