| Oriphiel |
05-22-2015 10:42 PM |
I'm bored, and I want to destroy something beautiful. People keep gushing about The Babadook, and I want to be the devil's advocate. Ye be warned, matey, that vast spoilers be ahead.
The Babadook V.S. Frankenhooker
To be completely blunt, both movies are very derivative. At it's heart, the Babadook is heavily influenced by Ju-On (aka The Grudge); it's a story about a dark swirly shadow monster that there is absolutely no escape from, and it even copies the ghost from Ju-On's scratchy moaning (as well as the whole "It never forgives, it never forgets"/"If it's in a word or in a look, you can't get rid of The Babadook" creepy catchphrase about how you can't defeat the impending evil). Literally as soon as the monster fucking called the lady on the telephone just to say "BABADOoOoOoOK!" I burst out laughing, and the movie lost all sense of creativity and tension. Now, the creators of Babadook did something very intelligent; they appealed to the artsy fartsy crowd, by throwing in a few very un-subtle hints that the monster is really just the lady. Don't believe the arthouse hype factories when they tell you that the movie has deep layers of meaning, because it's all really very simple, and the movie basically holds your hand and shoves it's messages into your face. If you really want deep psychological horror, go fucking re-watch The Shining. Take Ju-On's metaphors for how the actions of the past continue to harm future generations, and how terrifying it is to have your future ultimately ruined by the people who lived before you (a powerful metaphor coming from a nation that had to live through atomic blasts), and replace them with metaphors for how mixed up people can be when they become stressed out and shunned by society, how people can be driven to do terrible things that seem beyond reason, and how the line between our horrors and our desires can become blurred when under duress. The Babadook is no more "meaningful" or "complicated" than it's main stylistic inspiration, which is disappointing considering the massive hype of how this was "the future of Horror films".
Basically, The Babadook is a reproduction of the classic Horror novel The Exorcist. It's a story of a child being attacked by a horrible creature, and yet the story constantly gives evidence that the "horrible creature" is nothing more than a mixture of fear and imagination, brought about by a single mother, whom the child believes blames them for their past troubles. But both stories also hint strongly that the monster is real, or at least a metaphor meant to demonstrate a specific point to the audience. It's been done before, and The Babadook just doesn't add anything new to it.
And now... Frankenhooker. I don't really know where to begin with this god damn movie. Obviously, it's based on the infamous story that I really don't even need to name. However, beyond the appearance of a "mad scientist" who reanimates a corpse, this movie actually has nothing to do with the original subject matter. While the original was a cautionary tale about fucking with nature (or at least, that's the most popular interpretation), this movie is more about examining just what exactly the word "nature" means, and what constitutes being "natural", as well as criticizing men who objectify women (which is odd, considering how exploitative this movie is). Of course, this is spread out through various scenes of naked ladies, guts galore, and super-crack, in true Roger "Nudity Every Ten Pages of the Screenplay" Corman fashion. But the message is still there, and it's actually subtle enough that most people miss it. The story revolves around a man who accidentally kills his fiance with a remote-controlled lawnmower, and vows to bring her back to life. In his hands, he has the power to rebuild her by creating a serum that can keep body parts alive and functional until they can be pieced back together.
This is when the movie starts to send a message. Instead of creating a universal serum, he creates a batch that is based solely on Female hormones, and he sets about laboriously redesigning his fiance to be physically his ideal woman, while amassing a collection of "perfect" female parts (when he could have used the serum to keep limbs from both genders alive. But, of course, he never even thinks for a second about rebuilding himself to be her ideal man). To come up with the formulas he needs to make everything work, he drills holes into his skull to stimulate different parts of his brain, and to get the parts he needs, he kills a bunch of hookers with a drug called "super-crack" that makes them explode. One of the most telling parts of the movie is when, right before killing the female prostitutes, he sees two of them having sex, and he yells "Don't do that! It's not natural!". At first it seems like a stupid joke, but it actually is a pretty solid commentary on the human psyche. So many people and groups justify their actions by calling them "natural", while they hurt or ostracize people who are deemed "unnatural". The main character is fine with things like drilling holes into his head, giving people deadly explosive super-crack, rebuilding his dead fiance, and he considers these "natural" because they help him to fulfill his desires. It's a very strong message about how humans often just do whatever feels right at the moment, and later use morality as nothing more then a tool of justifying their inclinations. How can we claim that anything we do is "natural", and why does the term "natural" have a positive connotation to it? Threaded clothing doesn't appear in nature; it's made. Cars, planes, pills, musical instruments, tools, the computer I am currently typing on... all of these things can technically be seen as "unnatural", as they don't occur without being created. And yet they are "natural", being extensions of the primal psyche of ancient humans, and the rudimentary behavior we formed in order to survive, using our intellect to create what other animals could not. But by that logic, isn't everything we create natural? And isn't everything we think, in a way, natural? Of course, that would also mean that nothing is, in particular, more "natural" than anything else.
The story heats up when his fiance comes back to life, and stomps around the city like Godzilla, smacking people around. He catches her and brings her back to his lab, where he is summarily killed by the angry pimp of the prostitutes he exploded. His girlfriend saves his life by using his serum, equipment, and lab notes, to bring him back... but there's a catch. His body was destroyed, and his batch of serum was only designed to sustain female parts (of which there were still plenty left over from his killing-spree). She had to attach his head to a body made of female parts. He starts screaming and basically wishing he was dead, even though his fiance fucking saved his life and still loves him after all he put her through. He's unable to see past the pointless barriers of gender, barriers that he himself was all too willing to confine his fiance to. In a way, it's poetic justice; he chose the parts, and now he is the one who has to wear them (not to mention that he rebuilt her without giving a fuck about what she wanted, and yet got pissed off when she rebuilt him, even though she did it for love rather than sex). But he would rather be dead then have to live as the "ideal" woman that he himself gathered the parts to make.
The Verdict:
The Babadook is mostly well made, and I have to commend it for avoiding jump scares, but Horror fans will probably find it very cliche and unremarkable. It's a solid film with a few rough patches. Frankenhooker is pretty much the opposite, being a rough film with a few solid patches. It's not even close to the level of production and maturity that The Babadook had, but at the same time it just has these weird and subtle moments of true originality and clarity, dealing with issues and topics that most movies shy away from. The Babadook was actually fairly scary, which is the ultimate goal of a solid Horror film, but Frankenhooker just got me thinking so much that I ended up remembering much more about it, and writing way more in the synopsis than I intended to. It seems like a tie, but there is one thing that tips the scales in favor of one of the movies...
"If you should see one movie this year, it should be Frankenhooker." - Bill Fucking Murray
|
