The pits. Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) tries to get reborn through the pregnancy of his enemy Alice (Lisa Wilcox) in the last installment (1989) of the horror series. The few halfway decent ideas in the story (by John Skip, Craig Spector, and Leslie Bohem) and production design (by C.J. Strawn) are mercilessly and fatally crushed by the inept direction of Stephen Hopkins and the flaccid editing. After the genuine interest of Renny Harlin’s fourth installment, the series here takes a depressing nosedive into zero-degree filmmaking. With Danny Hassel, Kelly Jo Minter, and Joe Seely. R, 89 min. (JR)
The virtues as well as the limitations of this bizarre fantasy from New Zealand, winner of half a dozen Australian Oscars (1988, 91 min.), stem from its literary conception. Though the story is an original (by director Vincent Ward), and Ward’s use of color as well as black and white gives it a very distinctive look, it feels like an idea translated into cinematic terms rather than a cinematic conception. In a remote English mining village threatened by the Black Death in 1348, a visionary boy (Hamish McFarlane) has a troubled dream that spells out possible salvation, which involves digging through the center of the earth to a celestial city and placing a cross on the spire of a cathedral. He sets out with four miners to fulfill this mission, and they eventually wind up in a modern (i.e., 1988) metropolis. Rather than play this conceit for satire, Ward and his cowriters Kely Lyons and Geoff Chapple stick pretty close to the funereal rhythm and doom-ridden mood that they establish at the outset. What emerges is not entirely successful; the switches between color and black and white often seem more mechanical than integral, and the hallucinatory atmosphere is occasionally diluted rather than enhanced by the blocky narrative continuity. But the originality of the whole conception and its gradual unfolding still make this a compelling and novel experience. With Bruce Lyons and Chris Haywood. (JR)
He made us laugh, wrote Bob Woodward in his book about the death of John Belushi, and now he can make us think. Unfortunately, there are only a few laughs in this interminable screen adaptation, about half of which seem unintentional, and no thoughts at all. Although Michael Chiklis does a creditable job of impersonating Belushi, the lack of any discernible raison d’etre behind this lame replay of All That Jazz and Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Callingmovies that were at least motivated by their status as confessions and auto-critiquesmakes for a peculiarly rudderless biopic bound for nowhere. There are no insights offered into either Belushi or his milieu, and all that keeps this movie going is its arsenal of hand-me-down arty conceits: a very square-looking Woodward (J.T. Walsh) walking around with a notepad, Belushi visiting his own past under the custody of a Puerto Rican guardian angel (Ray Sharkey), and some faltering attempts to juice things up with various kinds of disjunctive editing. Earl Mac Rauch’s script and Larry Peerce’s direction are equally uninspired. This is the movie that Hollywood didn’t want you to see; now you know why. With Patti D’Arbanville, Lucinda Jenney, Alex Rocco, and Gary Groomes. (JR)
Spanish surrealist playwright Fernando Arrabal loosely adapted his own autobiographical novel Baal Babylon, about a 12-year-old boy growing up during the Spanish civil war, into this violent, scatological, blasphemous, and extremely tiresome phantasmagoria, with very little filmic sense. If you like this, you might think it has something to do with Bosch, but it looked like bosh to me back in 1971, when misogynist visionary romps of this ilk were all the rage. In French with subtitles. 90 min. (JR)
The greatness of Carl Dreyer’s first sound film (1932, 83 min.) derives partly from its handling of the vampire theme in terms of sexuality and eroticism and partly from its highly distinctive, dreamy look, but it also has something to do with Dreyer’s radical recasting of narrative form. Synopsizing the film not only betrays but misrepresents it: while never less than mesmerizing, it confounds conventions for establishing point of view and continuity, inventing a narrative language all its own. Some of the moods and images conveyed by this language are truly uncanny: the long voyage of a coffin, from the apparent viewpoint of the corpse inside; a dance of ghostly shadows inside a barn; a female vampire’s expression of carnal desire for her fragile sister; an evil doctor’s mysterious death by suffocation in a flour mill; a protracted dream sequence that manages to dovetail eerily into the narrative proper. The remarkable sound track, created entirely in a studio (in contrast to the images, which were all filmed on location), is an essential part of the film’s voluptuous and haunting otherworldliness. (Vampyr was originally released by Dreyer in four separate versionsFrench, English, German, and Danish; most circulating prints now contain portions of two or three of these versions, although the dialogue is pretty sparse.) If you’ve never seen a Carl Dreyer film and wonder why many critics, myself included, regard him as possibly the greatest of all filmmakers, this chilling horror fantasy is the perfect place to begin to understand. (JR)
