Wolf Awareness Week - Day 3

 

Van Helsing

2004

D: Stephen Sommers

**********

Pros: Art Direction, Design

Cons: Story, Bland Characters, Action, Running Time, Poorly-Researched Religion

     I wasn’t expecting much out of Van Helsing, but it looked like it would be decent diversion while I watched it in preparation for Wolf Week.  The visual style and the design looked good; I loved the color saturation used in it.  I was expecting to be passably amused until I pressed the select button on my Sixaxis controller and found out that the running time was a completely uncalled for 2 hours and 10 minutes.  A movie this unsubstantial should be over in 80-90 minutes, but I was apparently in for a long watch.

     The movie begins with a flashback in 1887, where Dr. Frankenstein (Samuel West) is confronted by Count Dracula (Richard Roxburgh), who wants to use Frankenstein’s monster (Shuler Hensley) for his evil plans.  Frankenstein refuses, and Dracula kills him.  Coincidentally, the angry villagers come to burn down Frankenstein’s castle, forcing the monster to flee with his creator’s body to a windmill, which is burned down with him inside.  The sequence is beautifully shot in black and white, and I love the monster’s design.  Less impressive is Dracula, who not only is played by a painfully hammy actor, but is also humiliated with a poor character design.  Guys, a ponytail is never the answer.  Never.

     A year later, we’re introduced to color and our hero.  Gabriel Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) is in Paris looking to apprehend Mr. Hyde (v. Robbie Coltrane), but instead has to kill him with some silly stylized weaponry.  At one point we’re treated to a shot of Mr. Hyde’s ass as his trousers slip down, so thanks for that, movie.  The action is terrible.  It’s the kind where CGI rag dolls are thrown around quickly in the sky while a virtual camera follows them through nondescript digital debris.  That’s most of what passes for action in this movie.  After this, Van Helsing travels to the Vatican, where he is chided for his failure to bring in Mr. Hyde.  He is led down to war room of the secret organization he works for.  People of all faiths are shown working in cooperation in this scene, but this doesn’t go anywhere since the movie’s dominant religion is poorly-researched Catholicism.  Here he picks up quirky inventor friar Carl (David Wenham) as a sidekick and receives his new mission: go to Transylvania and protect the last of the Valerious family, a clan which swore to be doomed to Purgatory until Dracula is killed.  This seems like a bit of a dick move for the family’s forefather to make such a pledge to the Vatican, which I highly doubt can make that call anyway.

     Unfortunately, while the two remaining Valerious children Anna (Kate Beckinsale) and Velkan (Will Kemp) are fighting a werewolf, Velkan is lost over a cliff and leaves Anna the sole survivor.  Say what you will about the CGI used to bring it to life, that is a legit werewolf design.  This is a basic example of werewolves should look like in my book. 

When Van Helsing arrives in town, he discusses the clichéd nature of his amnesia with Carl in way I’m sure will not have significance later.  After meeting Anna, he saves her from Dracula’s brides (Silvia Colloca, Alena Anaya, Josie Maran), killing one of them.  He tries to convince her to lay low while he tries to kill Dracula. This is actually a reasonable suggestion, considering that the souls of Anna’s family are dependent on her life, but of course she refuses.  However, it is revealed that Velkan still lives as a werewolf under the control of Dracula.  With the help of the treacherous Igor (Kevin J. O’Connor), Dracula uses Velkan as a substitute for Dracula’s monster to channel lightning in order to bring life to his undead children.  These monsters are stillborn and stored in nasty alien-like pouches in Frankenstein’s castle.  I must say, judging by the sheer number of egg sacs, Dracula had a LOT of sex with his brides.

The experiment works temporarily, unleashing a swarm of blood-sucking monsters to feed on the local villagers until the heroes thwart Dracula’s efforts.  Because Velkan was insufficient for the experiment, the infant vampires die.  Carl heroically saves a woman from being killed by one, and he seems perfectly willing to sleep with the damsel.  When she points out that he’s a monk, he comes up with the excuse that he’s a friar, ignoring the fact that most friars have a vow of celibacy and that’s moot since extramarital sex isn’t really allowed in most Christian sects anyway.  When Van Helsing confronts Dracula he predictably gets a déjà vu moment, and after the battle, he is walking with Anna when they fall through the ground.  The movie then cuts to another scene where Carl finds a clue that suggests that Dracula needs to be killed by a werewolf.

     That would have been a funny moment if it hadn’t been acknowledged later.  However, they just fell into the wreckage of the windmill, where the Frankenstein monster has been hiding for the last year.  The monster doesn’t say much interesting, but he may be the most sympathetic character in the movie.  Knowing how dangerous his role in Dracula’s plans is, he asks Van Helsing to kill him, but the latter has him put in a carriage to Rome for protection.  Unfortunately, the carriage is attacked by Velkan and the two remaining brides.  The second bride is killed with an adimittedly cool trick involving a decoy carriage filled with stakes and explosives.  Velkan is also killed after he bites Van Helsing, and the third bride Aleera (Anaya) takes Anna captive.

     Dracula tries to make a deal with Van Helsing: come to Budapest and trade the monster for Anna.  Van Helsing tries to take Anna without giving up the monster, but encounters an army of vampires with Dracula.  Though Anna is rescued and the army of vampires is easily dispatched by one of Carl’s inventions, Dracula succeeds in capturing the monster.  In other words, this subplot was totally pointless.  They could have just had the monster get captured in the carriage scene and saved audience a lot of time.  Stuff like this, in addition to time-consuming action sequences that aren’t even good, is the reason why this movie has pacing issues. 

     After this, Van Helsing, Ann and Carl look through some clues and discover that only a werewolf can kill Dracula (which makes you wonder why Dracula kept Velkan around).  Van Helsing has to wait until midnight strikes on the Full Moon and then kill Dracula before the final chime of the bell.  Just don’t ask why an ancient magic is dependent on such a recent and artificial construct as the chimes of a clockwork bell.  They find a magic door to the ice zone where Dracula’s castle is.  When confronted, Dracula reveals the ridiculous explanation for Van Helsing’s amnesia: he is actually the angel Gabriel and he killed Dracula, leading the latter to make a deal with the devil.  He offers Van Helsing the chance to get his memories back, but is refused.  Van Helsing turns into an awesome black werewolf and kills Dracula.

Igor, Aleera and the vampire brood are also killed, the monster is saved, and there’s a lot of long, boring stuff that happens on a bridge.  Unfortunately, werewolf Van Helsing kills Anna when she administers the lycanthropy antidote to him.  Of course, we can’t have the hero remain a werewolf; that would be too awesome.  The movie ends with the Frankenstein monster rowing to parts unknown while Van Helsing and Carl cremate Anna’s body, even though the Catholic Church strongly discouraged the practice at the time.

       Van Helsing is supposed to be a fun action interpretation of a classic horror story, but it’s too tedious to work.  The action scenes aren’t very good, and the characters are bland.  Van Helsing’s amnesia is a clichéd trope, and not even the charismatic Hugh Jackman can save the role, even if he does wear cool black clothes and turns into a werewolf.  Kat Beckinsale’s character is a generic action girl.  Carl is a typical sidekick.  Dracula is particularly underwhelming due to his bad design and hamtastic performance.  He only really gets one good line, too.  The movie is also far longer than it has a right to be.  As dull as the movie is, it is pretty nice to look at when the camera isn’t too spastic.  I love the coloration and design, and even the end credits sequence looks pretty good.  I still don’t recommend sitting through it.         

    

           

ANNA: A silver stake?  A crucifix?  What, do you think we haven’t tried everything before?  We’ve shot him, stabbed him, clubbed him, sprayed him with holy water, staked him through the heart and still he lives!  Do you understand?  No one knows how to kill Dracula!

VAN HELSING: Well, I could’ve used that information a little earlier.

DRACULA: I can tell the character of a man by the sound of his heartbeat. [claps to the rhythm of a heartbeat]  Usually when I approach [claps faster] I can almost dance to the beat. [claps slower]  Strange that yours is so steady. 

CARL: If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s to never stick your hand into a viscous material.

ALEERA: Anna, my love, it is your blood that shall keep me beautiful.  What do you think of that?

[Anna kills her]

ANNA: I think if you’re going to kill someone, kill them.  Don’t stand around talking about it.

Wolf Awarness Week - Day 2

Wolfen

1981

D: Michael Wadleigh

**********

Pros: Direction, Characters, First Act

Cons: Story, Fatuous Moral, Disappointing Payoff

     It’s unfortunate when a bad movie tricks you into thinking it’s good, but that’s what Wolfen does.  It starts out solidly, but eventually the shit rears its ugly head, leaving you cold, empty and alone.  It begins with a mysterious killing of a wealthy man and his wife in New York.  The attack is seen from the point of view of a wolf, which is done through an in-camera effect similar to the one that would later be used in Predator.  James Horner, a composer infamous for recycling his own themes, gives the theme a motif that sounds familiar to those heard in Star Trek II and Aliens.  Overall, the scene is very well-done.  It helps establish some thrills and has some decently-executed violence, but it doesn’t reveal too much.

     Investigating the crime is NYPD Detective Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney) with the help of police coroner Wittington (Gregory Hines) and criminal psychologist Rebecca Neff (Diane Venora).  At the crime scene it is mentioned that the victims’ bodyguard has voodoo connections, but this is one of the many red herrings in the movie that go absolutely nowhere.  The movie starts out quite well.  The protagonists don’t have much in the way of interesting backstories, but they are likable enough, and I enjoy their chemistry.  I like how a horror movie combines itself with a police procedural, a refreshing departure from the typical situation involving fools stumbling into abandoned cottages.  While the wolf prey off homeless people, our heroes encounter an insane amount of red herrings, most of which are more interesting than the movie’s final payoff.

     Most of the police force believes that a terrorist group called “Gotterdammerung” is responsible for the slayings.   Wilson has his doubts, and it’s already obvious to the audience that this group is not to blame.  He and Wittington also encounter a creepy zoologist named Ferguson (Tom Noonan) who seems oddly sympathetic to wolves.  He goes on so much about how corrupt man is and how put-upon the wolves are that one can’t help but think he’s a werewolf.  He even watches footage of wolf-hunting just to use as empathy porn.  This subplot doesn’t last long, however, since the he is mauled to death by the movie’s lupine antagonists. 

      The story’s primary suspects are a group of radical Native Americans led by Eddie Holt (Edward James Olmos, who is Hispanic).  Not only are they depicted as annoyingly smug fanatics, Holt is revealed to no qualms about killing other Native Americans who “sell out.”  They talk to Wilson about wolf spirits called the Wolfen, which are supposedly more intelligent than humans.  They talk about that how much more blameless they are than the humans who took their land (gee, it’s almost like an allegory).   I must say the movies interpretation of the Noble Savage fallacy is one of the more insulting I’ve seen, since it defines “noble savage” as “smug, arrogant murder who venerates wolf spirits.”  After the movie heavily implies that at least some of these Native Americans are werewolves, Wilson tails one of them at night.  The man ritualistically disrobes and….pretends to turn into a wolf.  No, really.  He just gets on all fours and starts acting like a g--dam wolf.  You know what’s more annoying than a movie’s pretending that something a man turns into is a werewolf?  A movie about a man pretending to turn into a werewolf.  With this incredibly anticlimactic twist, the movie confirms that it is not, in fact a werewolf movie, despite teasing the audience with imagery of full moons during the mauling scenes and even on the movie poster.

This movie is not worthy of such awesome posters.

      The movie truly hits rock bottom when Wilson and Wittington go looking for the wolves in some abandoned buildings at night.  Seeing how it’s probably not standard police procedure for a detective and a police coroner to take some M-16’s out on an urban hunting trip, it’s sadly predictable what happens next.  The black guy dies.  The movie spent its first act building suspense effectively and fooling me into thinking it wasn’t a typical horror movie, but this scene brought Wolfen down to the level of the worst horror films.  This is even more frustrating when you consider that Gregory Hines’ charisma, combined with the humor and intelligence of his character, made Wittington the most entertaining and likable character in the movie.  This character was too cool and to come off as tokenism; he actually came off as a co-protagonist to Wilson.  Wittington was actually a stronger character than Wilson, and if the latter had been killed in the scene, it would have been truly unexpected.  Hell, if Wittington had ended up being the hero, it would have at least partially actually compensated for all the movie’s crap.  At least he does a hilarious double-take right before the wolf jumps him.

             

       It’s eventually revealed that the Wolfen are simply a subspecies of wolf that seems to be cleverer than the usual variety.  They have spent years living in New York City under the shadow of humans, killing the occasional homeless person for food.  When rich people tried to develop the slums that they were living in, they started to strike back at the land developers.  Wilson eventually confronts the pack in one of the skyscrapers of the developers, but finds himself unable to resist them by force.  He realizes their motivations, and symbolically smashes the housing development plan models in front of them.  For some reason, this is good enough to convince the Wolfen that he’s on their side now (rather than just trying to pander to them to save his skin).  And yet the repay Tom Noonan’s genuine sympathy by killing him.  That makes sense.  The fact that the wolves decide to spare Wilson for this seems to confirm that they are sapient beings with a code of conduct rather that unusually clever predatory animals.  As such, this actually makes them fair game for being judged like people.

     Despite this movie’s brazen attempts to romanticize these wolf beings as honorable hunters, they’re actually a bunch hypocritical, cowardly assholes.  Even with some concessions given toward different value systems, it’s hard to imagine any honor-based code of conduct which allows one to do what these wolves do.  Their land is taken from them by humans, and they’re obviously upset about it.  So what do they do about it?  Do they try to fight?  Do they leave?  No, they just lay low and prey on the weakest, most defenseless members of the society that conquered them.  The movie suggests that they have an arrogant disdain for the humans as lesser beings, despite our cultural and technological accomplishments shaming theirs.  And that’s what this movie has to offer us after all those ridiculous red herrings that are resolved far too soon: wolves that are assholes with a pathetic inferiority complex.  Almost anything would have been better than that.  If this is supposed to work as an allegory for Native Americans, it’s heavily insulting.  This would be the movie’s poster if it were more honest:    

           

     The movie still has the chutzpah to preach to the audience about how awesome the Wolfen are.  It ends with the most trite closing narration you could imagine: “We humans don’t know what we’re doing when we hurt the environment.  We don’t understand nature, so we just let wolf people murder the homeless.”  So the wolves get away with what they do, and the frustrating thing is that the movie refuses to acknowledge this is a bad thing or hold them responsible for their actions.

        Wolfen is Michael Wadleigh’s only film besides two documentaries.  This is a shame because he actually does a good job directing.  The cinematography is great, New York landmarks are used well to create symbolism and suspense in the movie, and the story is well-paced. .  As I mentioned before, he uses some tricks that would help benefit more famous movies later.   James Horner’s score does a good job of helping establish the atmosphere, despite his trademark recycling.  The movie started out with a lot of promise and good execution, but nothing really salvages such an anticlimactic and fatuous story.  At least with Balto II: Wolf Quest, you could see it coming.    

MEMORABLE QUOTES

WITTINGTON: Now ain’t this a shame?  Bizarre, man.  Almost severed her head.

WILSON: Was instantaneous?

WITTINGTON: Instantaneous?  You see a chicken run around with its head cut off?  Nobody ever thinks about the head.  During the French Revolution, when they chopped the heads off they quick’ picked them by the basket and looked them in the face.  Now, most went out right away in shock.  Every fifth head or so was alive, wide awake, eyes blinking, mouth trying to say something.

WILSON: Yeah, sure.

WITTINGTON: The brain can live without oxygen for more than a minute.  That’s a long time, buddy boy.  How’d you like to see your own body and know you’re dead?

WILSON: Give me a nice death in bed, preferably with a partner.

WITTINGTON: You can take her away now.  Hey, careful with her…

[offscreen plop]

COP 1: Aw shit.

WITTINGTON: ….head.

COP 2: You pick it up.

COP 1: I’m not picking it up. 

WITTINGTON: Getting a little excited, dude?  Pants getting wet yet? [is immediately attacked by a wolf]

Wolf Awareness Week - Day 1

 

Balto II: Wolf Quest

2002

D: Phil Weinstein

**********

Pros: Decent Animation, Some Touching Moments

Cons: New Age Pseudo-Mysticism

     Yes, Wolf Awareness Week is a thing, and I’ve decided make a review of a wolf movie on each of its days.  It’s no secret that America loves wolves.  We love them so much that a vice presidential candidate supported hunting them, and we were so offended that we turned control of our country over to someone who thinks that abortion should apply to the already born.  There’s something about this creature’s beauty and mystery that captures our collective imagination more than even more formidable animals. 

     I really enjoyed Balto.  Though there was some Disnification involved (such as the inclusion of pointless comic relief characters), it did as much justice to the real event as I suspect an anthropomorphic animal movie would.  It still took the situation seriously and kept the suspense appropriately high.  And like any good animated family film, it inspired a series of mediocre direct-to-video sequels.  While a title like Wolf Quest certainly indicates quality, Balto II surprisingly isn’t that good.  When I watched this, I had to modify my list for Wolf Awareness Week, as it would have been wrong not to include this movie.  Its sheer wolfaboonery is staggering. 

    After the events of the first movie, Balto (Maurice LaMarche) and his love interest Jenna (Jodi Benson) have a litter of six.  Most of the puppies look like Jenna, a purebred Husky who looks like a Border Collie for some reason, but one, Aleu, looks just like her wolfdog father.  In fact, it’s said that she looks even more like wolf than Balto does.  This causes some worry for the parents when they give the puppies away for adoption.  From an anthropomorphic point of view, it is a bit unsettling that the parents would do this.  Nome, however, is depicted in this movie as nothing more than a block of buildings, which implies that they could still have contact with their children afterward.  Unfortunately, this is not conclusively established until the next movie.  Aleu is told not to howl like a wolf (though huskies seem to howl, too) while on display, but she says she can’t help the instinct (even though it seems to be learned behavior, otherwise what’s this guy doing?).  While the puppies that look like Border Collies Huskies get adopted quickly, their more lupine sister is rejected, and it is a little sad to watch.  The movie seems to ignore the fact that, despite their appearance, all the other puppies in the litter are also wolf hybrids and may have unpredictable temperaments.

     Years later, we see a grown Aleu (Lacey Chabert) playing in the woods with her father and the comic relief characters from the last film, Boris (Charlies Fleischer), Muk and Luk (Kevin Schon).  In a conversation with Balto, we find out the latter has yet sit her down and tell her some necessary truths.  She is nearly full-grown and she is under the impression that she still has a chance to get adopted by a human family.  Drama strikes when she encounters a hunter with a Winchester repeater and innocently runs toward him to play.  The hunter responds the way anyone would if he gun and there was a wolf charging toward him, but Balto tackles him just in time.  You’d think he would have taught Aleu some common sense tips how avoid being mistaken for a wolf and getting shot.  Perhaps he thought doing that would just be encouraging the Hunting Culture.  He finally has to tell his distraught daughter that they are part wolf, a revelation that results in Aleu throwing a teenaged tantrum in which she tells Balto that she hates him and runs off.  She should have gone to her mother, who would have probably comforted her by revealing that her own mother banged a Border Collie, but she didn’t.

     Balto, assuming that she just needs to blow off some steam, goes to sleep and has a cryptic and prophetic dream where he is pursuing some cervines over breaking ice and a body of water while being menaced by a ghostly raven.  It starts out not unlike this, only without the awesome music.  The dreams have been occurring throughout the beginning of the movie, and are decidedly repetitive and tedious.  When he wakes up and talks to his friends, he realizes that Aleu has not come back and he goes off looking for her.  He starts encountering the ghostly raven, as well as some symbolic animals seen on a totem pole in his dream.  The first is a vixen (Mary Kay Bergman) who, despite her supposedly being a clever trickster, has gotten her neck and paw caught in an awkwardly-placed trap on a fallen tree over a river.  When Balto frees her, she repays him by shoving him into the rapids below.  While he struggles to swim, the vixen shouts to him that he must help himself.  So, much like a vulpine version of Jigsaw, she just did a pointlessly cruel thing to someone under the pretense of giving him an opportunity for self-discovery.  You know, I should just start chasing people with intent to kill and eat them while giving them a pep talk.  Helping people with their spiritual journeys is fun. 

     After some other scenes with other characters, the movie suddenly cuts to a scene in medias res where Balto is surrounded by three demonic wolverines (Rob Paulsen, Kevin Schone and Mary Kay Bergman), who attempt to trash talk him into submission.  When he refuses to back down, the wolverines disappear into a mist (this happens a lot in the movie).  Boris, Muk and Luk try to accompany him, but they are rebuffed by an unknown mystic force.  I’m all for deus ex machinas when they take the comic relief characters out of the movie.

     Meanwhile, Aleu ventures into a cave where she sees a mouse named Muru (Peter MacNicol) playing music that sounds like a church hymn through some magic crystals.  He points out some constellations on the cave walls, and asks Aleu who she is.  When she tells him she is the daughter of a wolfdog and a Border Husky, he says that that’s what she is, and not who she is.  Having made his point and singing a forgettable song, he…becomes one of the constellations.  Okay.  Aleu leaves the cave and is promptly attacked by a demonic bear.  At this point, Balto finally finds her and helps her fight.  When Aleu looks into the bear’s eyes, she “sees its thoughts” and does something absolutely baffling.  She tells her father that they must escape the bear by jumping off the nearby cliff.  When Balto refuses, she shoves him off and jumps after him (there seems to be a theme of Balto’s getting shoved off high places by women).  The movie reveals this:

That's CRAP.

They have landed on a flat surface that was no more than ten feet below the “cliff” which slopes down.  That’s crap.  The bear, apparently too lazy to follow them, disappears into a mist.

     Balto is happy because now he thinks they can go home, but Aleu tells him she has to find out who she is because a pious mouse told her to.  I would agree with Balto that family and upbringing plays an essential part in defining who you are, but the movie seems to be siding with nature over nurture.  They encounter a wolf pack led by Nava (David Carradine), who wants to lead the pack to more fertile lands to find food.  He has his share of obnoxious mysticism, since he can apparently jump into trees and become one with them.  Unfortunately, a younger wolf named Niju (Mark Hamill) wants to usurp Nava and invade the lands of other packs.  When Balto and Aleu get involved, everyone believes Balto will be the one who take over leadership from the aging Nava due to his visions and the fact that latter has never prepared a successor for some reason.  In what is arguably the most absurd moment in the whole movie,  the floating ice on the nearby lake conveniently forms a pathway to another land where there is food. 

It's a bridge of bullshit!

When the wolves attempt to cross the Bullshit Bridge, Niju decides to make trouble, which separates him, Nava, Aleu and Balto from the pack.  At some point in the skirmish, Aleu is goes underwater and apparently ends up in another dimension where space and physics do not apply.

When it’s apparent that Nava cannot swim across to the pack, Aleu realizes it is her destiny to lead the wolves in their new home.  She says goodbye to Balto and swims across to the other wolves.  It’s good that they’re open-minded enough to allow someone who’s  ¾ dog to lead them, especially one with little to no experience.  Now one may wonder: if that was Aleu’s destiny all along, why was Balto the one having all those dreams and going through all that self-discovery described in the fourth paragraph?  Why, to lead audience astray so they can be “surprised” by the not-at-all-predictable conclusion, of course! 

      After Nava leaves Balto to go and attempt to reconcile with Niju, Balto sees a vision of the white wolf similar to the one from the previous movie, which is suggested to be his mother before it disappears into a mist.  He then has some flashbacks to the times in which Aleu was a puppy, which I must admit choked me up a bit.  Unfortunately the movie doesn’t seem to care that Jenna never got a chance to say goodbye.

      Balto II: Wolf Quest is an extremely cheesy movie with about as much pseudo-Native American spiritualism as one would expect.  It’s not too surprising that it was like a film version of a wolf t-shirt.   There’s a lot to dislike about it, such as the pointless stretches of plot made as if to intentionally mislead us while providing obligatory mysticism.  I particularly don’t like its position on the nature vs. nurture question.  Despite this it has its redeeming features.  The comic relief characters were thankfully downplayed.  The scenes with Aleu as a puppy melted my heart because I’m a softie.  Animation is decent and the voice acting is good, too.  I liked Maurice LaMarche’s performance as Balto.  I don’t have a copy of the first movie in order to make a comparison with Kevin Bacon’s voice, but I’m a little biased toward LaMarche since I think it appropriate that voice roles be filled by voice actors.  David Carradine fits well as the wise leader of a wolf pack.  Mark Hamill pretty much uses his Joker voice in his role while Rob Paulsen, Jeff Bennet and Joe Alaskey voice his cronies.  Finally, at its core, Balto II actually has a pretty solid premise: a girl trying to find her destiny and a father who has to find the strength to let go.  If not for the pseudo-mysticism and the pons ex machina, it might have actually been a decent movie.