No horror film of 2008 was anticipated more than The Ruins, which means that if it failed there was going to be a long drop to the bottom. It did. It was.
What happened? The movie was based on a bestselling novel by Scott Smith, author of A Simple Plan, and Smith wrote the script himself. For some reason, he signed it Scott B. Smith. As in “Johnny B. Good”? It’s not that the script stuck too close to the book; Smith changed up many elements. Should we blame it on the director, Carter Smith? This Smith didn’t bring much to the picnic, but plenty of horror movies about college kids in peril are poorly directed and no one seems to care.
For me, the problem is embedded in the story’s hook.
Our four American students, two couples, are on holiday in Mexico . At poolside they meet Mathias (Joe Anderson), a young German whose brother is off visiting a Mayan ruin, a pyramid that has only recently been discovered and is the exclusive archaeological site of a small group of scientists. Mathias is going to join his brother the next day and he invites the Yanks to go with him. Sounds like fun, right?
When they get there they climb to the top and look around. No brother. No archaeologists. And when they climb down and try to leave, the local Indians won’t let them. Guns, bows, arrows, knives, that sort of thing.
Back on top, they start finding remains of a deserted camp, and then body parts, and then it becomes clear that the plant that is encasing the ruin is not your average African violet. It will trap you and eat you. If you have an open wound or sore, it will grow into your body and mess you up from the inside. It can even mimic sounds to try to trap you.
And at that point I threw up my hands and tried, unsuccessfully, not to laugh. The plant wants to make Stacy (Laura Ramsey) jealous my mimicking the sounds of her boy friend
Eric (Shawn Ashmore) making whoopee with Amy (Jena Malone). And how, you ask, does a plant know what those sounds are? Yes, you may ask.
I also suspect that many audiences were turned off by the high voltage cruelty of the violence. Mathias breaks his legs. The last member of the student quartet is Jeff (Jonathan Tucker), a medical student who decides that the legs have to come off in order to keep the plant from killing the victim. This entails breaking the leg bones with a large rock and then cutting the limbs away with a small hunting knife. It’s one of the most queasy-making scenes since the advent of torture porn.
From the film’s first frame, we spend 90 minutes watching four human beings disintegrating, with primal screaming every step of the way. Smith and Smith provide us with no comic relief—the picture is relentlessly grim. Even Seneca tossed in a few chuckles. It may have been the darkest humor of all time, but these guys won’t give us that much.
Hard to believe, given the fact that sound reproducing, man-eating plants register pretty low on the Terror-O-Meter—so when it comes to meat-munching ivy, I say it’s spinach and I say to hell with it.
Now our second feature is a certified drive-in, B movie classic—Roger Corman’s The Little Shop of Horrors (1960). Not the musical remake. This LSH is the original black and white, shot in two days, 14th-billed Jack Nicholson, star on top of the Christmas tree beaut.
The plots of the two films are essentially the same. Seymour Krelboin (Jonathan Haze) works for Gravis Mushnik (Mel Welles), the “Skid Row Florist.” Yeah, that’s a sample of the movie’s innate silliness. Seymour is a human Shmoo—ordered around, yelled out, psychologically abused by the older man. All for ten bucks a week. What a deal.
The shop’s only other employee is Audrey Fulguard (Jackie Jospeh, who made a career of sweet-natured dimbulbs). She has a secret crush on Seymour . He likes her, too, and shows it by naming the new plant he created “Audrey Junior.”
Unfortunately, Audrey Junior is part Venus flytrap and demands blood in order to thrive. The more blood Seymour gives it, the larger it gets—and the more blood it demands. Finally, Seymour has to knock off the neighbors to provide skid row Miracle Gro. Seymour’s conquest of Audrey depends on the plant because the plant has become a local attraction. Money flows into the shop and even Mushnik is happy. Until, that is, the night he sees Seymour feeding body parts to his new Flower of Evil.
The musical is a Faustian fable, the moral of which is “Don’t feed the plants.” Corman’s and screenwriter Charles B. Griffith’s moral is, borrowing from another musical, “Morals tomorrow; comedy tonight.”
Griffith ’s script is a lot funnier than you expect it to be, with gags you have to be on your toes to get. Dick Miller plays Burson Fouch, a man who comes into the shop looking for something to eat. He eats flowers. A movie about man-eating plants features a character who is a man eating plants. That’s not even a visual pun. I don’t know what the hell kind of gag that is, but it works.
Jack Nicholson enters late and doesn’t stay long. He’s Wilbur Force, a Peter Lorre-esque masochist who calls on the skid row dentist (John Shaner) because he knows the guy will inflict the maximum amount of pain. Nicholson is funny, as is much of the film, in a Mad Magazine sort of way. You’ll enjoy him but, trust me, you will not see two Oscars in this guy’s future.
Corman famously shot the film in two days and part of the intervening night. It looks cheap and rushed, but not that cheap and rushed. Corman’s pictures are like those crafts you see at Farmers’ Markets that are made out of empty milk cartons. You know it’s something modified and you may like to look at it, but it’s perfectly plain that, at heart, it’s an empty milk carton.
And yes, as in the musical version, Audrey Junior talks. The voice is supplied by writer Griffith, who also plays a couple of uncredited roles. What, you expect Roger Corman to pay for additional actors? Please.
This is a subversive little gem—well, rhinestone anyway—that is not only a memorable way to spend 75 minutes, but is also a finger in the eye of big budget floparoos from the same era (Cleopatra, I’m looking at you.)
Which reminds me, I haven’t watched Carry On, Cleo is a long time
No comments:
Post a Comment