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Reviews
The Dummy (1982)
Every movie, but with a doll
A lady is home alone with a doll her boyfriend and she find on the floor. When her boyfriend leaves the doll goes after her and she experiences a night of terror, and the dummy is not so dumb.
This movie is pretty much every killer doll movie. It's freaky, but not in a way that hasn't been done before, and the only really new thing it does is making the killer doll genre bloody. It's a great shot when the doll has blood all over it. It makes some new combinations, like the Psycho shower but not actually attacking, and it being a doll. The under-the-door eye, but with a doll. Home invasion, but with a doll. You get the point. It takes a bunch of already existing ideas and puts them "with a doll."
The Night Flier (1997)
Plays with our desire to see the ugly
What is with people and needing to see everything? YouTube and magazines are stuffed with footage of real murder, real torture; and what's the attraction? Well
just to see terrible things and absorb the horror, which is messed up, and it doesn't take a genius to know that. The Night Flier certainly does.
Miguel Ferrer plays Robert Dees, a reporter from Inside Scoop, a magazine devoted to only the most morbid of news. He does it because it's a job, and like the rest of the world he gets a kick from the morbidity and he loves the blood, but he never, never, strictly never—in fear of the news perverting him—becomes personally involved, which of course gets challenged as his latest case absorbs him. Some wacko keeps flying his plane from airport to airport every night and mutilating people.
Before I even start with the hell this movie unleashed on me, I want to first mention the man behind it: Mark Pavia. This is his first major film, and he handles it as though he's directed hundreds. The pacing is perfect. Not once did I feel rushed into something or like he cut my enjoyment short, nor did anything drag for too long. And where Pavia really shines is in his uncanny ability in his frames to tease, showing so much of what we long to see, and then just barely covering it. It's like when I get a very specifically shaped gift and think I know what's inside, but never feel satisfied because the wrapper holds me one step a way from resolution.
And now, here is my evening spent with The Night Flier: first I scolded Inside Scoop and its workers for their exploitation entertainment, just as the film wanted me to, emphasizing and emphasizing how little the reporters cared about the victims. However, as the film progressed, my curiosity grew against my will about this killer
just as the reporter's did
just as the magazine's readers' did
just as the film wanted me to. And then Robert reports back about how mangled he found the victims, his boss responding, "This is great sh*t. The fatties in the supermarket line are gonna love this guy. God, I hope he kills more people," and I realized, "Oh no! I'm one of those fatties!"
That's right: The Night Flier makes you feel like a terrible person. Isn't that fun? Sure, Robert has his conflicts throughout the movie, but pretty soon I found myself not caring about him, because the conflict was in myself. For Robert, the stakes are low: if he leaves the case alone he won't have a story, and he loses a bit of pride for adhering to the killer's demands and staying away (something that could actually help him). For Katherine, the other investigator, the stakes are much higher, because she actually cares about exposing crime and making a difference in the world. She strives towards an ethical goal, and so her failure means she has failed her morality—a much more devastating stake than Robert's. And so what does The Night Flier do? Well, it teases us with Katherine as a could-have-been protagonist, then follows Robert instead, rubbing in our face we don't need Katherine and her high stakes to keep watching; we only need promise of a terrifying end. We care about Robert, but only as a tool to find the information and lead us to the action (just as we want actual reporters to do).
When The Night Flier, as if it hadn't teased us enough, finally gets to the action and the killer (who looks awesome, by the way!!) it then does something really mean: makes us care about Robert. It still reports the horror, but for the first time pities the victim, and thus really makes us feel bad. And the film ends on a very personal and sad note.
The Night Flier is a really smart film, showing a deep understanding of its interaction not with itself, but with the audience. It sadly does not go without flaws (the competition between Robert and Katherine becomes an unnecessary bore after awhile), but The Night Flier is a film aware of its every action, masterful with spectacle, and a letter to horror drenched with love
and also a lot of guilt.
The Changeling (1980)
Good premise lacking the needed execution for its movie merits, but still a good scare
Sometimes a movie can have everything at its fingertips, then get its fingertips chopped off in some horrible crash. I can imagine Peter Medak as the 1970s ended and the 80s began, reflecting on how horror had developed in the previous decade, the removal of censorship twenty years ago opening the door for blood and guts to splatter all over the industry. Medak decided to turn from the new and look back on a much quieter old, directing The Changeling, a haunted house flick relying, as the tradition goes, on strange noises, unexplained occurrences, communications with the dead, and, most of all, the absence of splattering bodies.
George C. Scott plays John Russell, a composer, professor, and family man who loses his wife and daughter in an auto accident. To escape their memories he moves to a new house and tries resuming his life, but strange events begin, and something in the house won't let him forget his dead family. It follows closely in the footsteps of Don't Look Now, if Don't Look Now had more genre and less sense, then butchered its own ideas.
Medak handles his film with spectacle. Gothic architecture, golden walls, a large stairwell winding to a mysterious attic, and various antiques all decorate John's new home, shot beautifully with the camera floating from room to room in a never-ending pan, wide shots showing the vastness of the mansion, and later there's a shot of a well, looking first in from above, then out from below. Also, Rick Wilson composed a nice piano score. So even the film strikes its logical bottom, everything looks at least aesthetically pleasing.
But as far as the plot goes, the crash is horrific, and then my heart ripped in half as the camera and John both loomed around the city, now so lonely and small. John has a counseling session, where conversation turns up some great quotes about recovery, and I truly rooted for John as he went from his compositions to his jobs, making an effort to grasp the goods in life. Then as the supernatural creeps in, the emotions go poof and never come back, no matter how many things remind John of his family. Medak attempts to juggle John's recovery with supernatural occurrences, as well as an investigation, and weaving these lines together is easy enough—after all, everything connects to John's tortured memories and difficult recovery—and yet somehow Medak manages to end one thing the second another begins and strips his story of every promise except its spookiness. John eventually isn't even the protagonists anymore, and unlike Psycho, the shift has no meaning.
The scriptwriter really screws himself over by writing an emotional story about an emotionally reserved person's emotions, and then failing to give him any scenes to show his emotions, but George C. Scott does best he could have, interrupting his stone-cold, no- shits-given expression with occasional looks of vulnerability. But when the scriptwriter has John try to cast away the spirits by going to a bridge and angrily tossing a ball, there's not much Scott can do in the way of bringing some sort of continuity to the writing's madly flapping strands.
Thankfully, even though The Changeling promises to elevate the genre and then disappoints, it still has enough of the horror within to hit home. Medak hides enough threats behind corners and darkness for the atmosphere to get in your belly, and the bathtub scene is terrifying. So when the ghost goes to outstanding lengths to achieve basically nothing, hints pop up of a possible possession then completely disappear, a relationship starts and never blossoms, and the most interesting character doesn't enter until we've stopped caring, at least doors hide behind bookshelves, wheelchairs come to life, and things light on fire.