The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen (18 page)

This is a feature-length “Animagic” stop-action jewel from Rankin/Bass, the people best known for creating the Christmas claymation perennial
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
. Featuring monster stop-motion figures designed by
Mad Magazine
artist Jack Davis (who cut his teeth drawing the EC horror comics of the '50s) and voice work by Boris Karloff,
Mad Monster Party
is a gothic gas. Designed to cash in on the late '60s monster-mania,
Mad Monster Party
took its lead from
The Addams Family
and
The Munsters
, mixing slapstick with classic bad guys. It's an irresistible blend, but despite the popularity of monster movies, TV shows, and the Aurora Model kits, it didn't do well on its theatrical release. It later won a cult audience when it started appearing on Saturday afternoon “Creature Feature” television shows.

Here's the story: With his life's work behind him — the development of a secret formula capable of destroying all matter — Baron Boris Von Frankenstein (Karloff) decides to hang up his test tubes. He invites all the world's great monsters — Frankenstein's monster and his Bride, the Werewolf, Dracula, the Invisible Man, and a Peter Lorre-esque character called Yetch — to join him for a farewell dinner. Also on the guest list is the Baron's bumbling nephew Felix Flankin, a human whom the Baron names as his successor to run the Worldwide Organization of Monsters. This doesn't sit well with the creepy conventioneers who scheme to do away with Felix.

Along the way there are plenty of swinging jazz tunes (written by Maury Lewis and Jules Bass), a Beatle-wig-wearing skeleton rock-and roll-band called Little Tibia & the Phibbeans, and some cool special effects. Best of all,
Mad Monster Party
is utterly devoid of the sentimental morality that weighed down the Rankin/Bass Christmas specials — this bristles with good fun and bad puns.

It's clear this film left an impression on a generation of filmmakers. Jim Henson's “Count” puppet for
Sesame Street
bears an uncanny resemblance to Davis's Dracula, and I'd bet Tim Burton referenced an old
Mad Monster Party
print more than once when he was making
The Nightmare Before Christmas
.

You know you're in for a long strange trip when the narrator of the film you're watching is a fish being scaled and butchered in a fish market. It's a surreal touch from director Denis Villeneuve in a stylish French-Canadian movie about how life can take an unexpected turn and kick you in the ass. “
Maelström
is about extremes,” says the Quebec-based director. “You have very dramatic moments with humor, and you have ultra-realistic moments with fantasy.”

The main character in
Maelström
is Bibiane Champagne (Marie-Josee Croze), a beautiful, 25-year-old Montreal woman whose life is unraveling. Early in the film she has an abortion, followed by a brush-off from the man responsible. In response she hits the nightclubs. Numbed by drugs and alcohol, she accidentally hits a man with her car, and panicked, leaves him lying on the road as she flees the scene. The next day she returns to the scene of the crime, only to discover the man died.

Racked with guilt, she tries to commit suicide by driving her car into a river. Emerging alive, metaphorically baptized in the water, she stares destiny in the face and tries to come to grips with her chaotic life.

Maelström
is a dark movie that explores the mysterious nature of fate and how seemingly unrelated events add up to form a whole. Bibiane is leading an accelerated life where one bad relationship leads to abortion, a drinking binge, and the death of an innocent person. While the film has a surrealistic feel, every tragic event in the movie is realistic and could actually happen. Bibiane is a victim of her own bad judgment, and not a particularly sympathetic character, but she isn't a monster. She is, like so many people, a person who refuses to acknowledge her shortcomings and mistakes. It's a nervy move to build a movie around a character like this, and an even harder job to cast it.

“Marie-Josée is very talented,” says Villeneuve, “and this was a very, very difficult role for her to do because she doesn't have a lot of tools. Very often [the character] is alone, and the emotion has to come when she is alone and doing nothing. When she is with others she is trapped and doesn't communicate.”

Croze is marvelous to watch onscreen. Since her feature film debut in 1993, she has worked extensively in both English and French, in Quebec-shot Hollywood fare like
Battlefield Earth
. Her Bibiane is totally believable, a multi-layered character that is both fragile and confused, but resilient. Her greatest feat is to make Bibiane likeable, and by the end of her rebirth to actually have the audience root for her. As she sorts out the mess she has made of her life, finding love and meaning along the way, Croze imbues Bibiane with a humanity that is hard to deny.

Villeneuve pieces the story together with aplomb. The abortion scene that opens the film is meant to grab the audience, and let them know they are not on safe ground. This is a movie that takes chances, one that keeps you off balance as it untangles Bibiane's anguish. The abortion is controversial, but absolutely necessary to the film's fabric.

“The abortion scene is the most important scene in the film,” says Villeneuve. “I think it is the most important scene I have ever shot. You always make a film in reaction to the film you made before, and
August 23rd on Earth
was not raw enough, not close enough to life. I wanted to add authenticity, according to my point of view. I didn't want the abortion to be disgusting, but I also didn't want it to be safe. I tried to find the right emotional impact that I think abortion is about. There is a relationship that I see between abortion and responsibility.”

Villeneuve pumps up the impact of the scene with music. As the doctors perform the cold, antiseptic procedure, the song “Good Morning, Starshine” from the peace and love musical
Hair
chirps cheerfully on the soundtrack, at stark odds with the pictures on the screen. It's an ironic choice that displays how life in the outside world will always continue despite whatever angst is playing out in your personal life.

“I like songs that are not in sync with the images,” says Villeneuve. “When there is a gap between the mood of the song and the mood of the scene it creates an emotional response, a tension, and a poetry that I think is more creative than just underlining the emotion.”

The abortion sequence might be shocking, but the tragicomic talking fish that narrate the tale are a memorable image that won't soon be forgotten. Sitting atop a bloody butcher block, a series of fish are about to meet their doom under the fishmonger's cleaver. Before they are filleted they try to articulate the movie's existential undercurrent of destiny and fate. In gruff voices they give us insight into the action onscreen.

“When I decided to write a movie in which several fish would tell the story I was expecting a lot of questions about that,” says Villeneuve. “It came from a nightmare, and I respect that a lot. In cinema I like a dream quality. Sometimes you might have a strong subconscious response, but sometimes you have difficulty explaining them. I'm not expecting people to get it. For me the fish is about my relationship with cinema. It's about the relationship with storytelling. I like the idea that those fish are close to death, but still trying to tell a story. For me it is like the storytellers from different backgrounds from the beginning of humanity who try and tell the same story, and then stop dead. Then someone else has to continue.

“It was a big casting when you make a little fish,” he continues, “because it is going to come alive with the voice. I had to find a very specific voice. Pierre Lebeau is an actor at home [Quebec] that has this beautiful voice and can bring humanity to this plastic fish.”

Maelström
is an intelligent, disturbing movie that is bound to spark thought about the vagaries of everyday life, and how one selfish or ill-conceived action can directly affect the lives of many people — simple cause and effect. It is a playfully cautionary story that advises the viewer to be careful and responsible.

Someone much smarter than me once said that there are only two types of stories. In the first a person goes on a journey. In the second, a stranger comes to town.
The Man Who Fell to Earth
, a spacey 1976 Nicolas Roeg thriller combines both premises with a science-fiction twist. David Bowie, in his feature film debut, plays a visitor from the planet Anthea who comes to earth in search of water.

As a cinematographer, Nicolas Roeg lent his expert visual style to the films of Clive Donner, David Lean, Richard Lester, and Francois Truffaut. His resumé as a director begins with a surreal 1970 movie that examined the nature of identity.
Performance
starred James Fox as Chas Devlin, a gangster on the run who moves in with Turner, a reclusive, androgynous rock star played by Mick Jagger. At first Devlin is disgusted by Turner's excessive existence, but soon their strange lifestyles become intertwined. Devlin spirals downward into Turner's world of drug-induced decadence, and his refuge becomes a hell as his own sense of reality starts to disappear.

Performance
baffled critics, who objected to the graphic violence, sex, and drug taking, with one critic asserting that it was “the outcome of an over-developed visual sense and an under-developed moral one.” Battles with censor boards in Europe and North America delayed the film's release for two years, and killed its chances of finding an audience. This commercial flop was followed by two critically acclaimed, but financially unrewarding films,
Walkabout
and
Don't Look Now
.

In the early development stages of his fourth film, an adaptation of the Walter Tevis novel
The Man Who Fell to Earth
, Roeg had considered Mick Jagger for the role of Mr. Newton, the alien, but decided that he was “too strong, too positive.” “I want somebody who looks as if he has no bones in his body,” he said. One night he happened to catch a bbc documentary featuring David Bowie called
Cracked Actor
. “Watching that film,” Roeg told writer Jerry Hopkins, “he was my film's character, Mr. Newton. My reaction was, ‘That's him alright, all wrapped up and done.'” Roeg was attracted to Bowie's otherworldly appearance, saying that he “exudes such a wonderfully perverse non-human quality.” Like Jagger before him, Bowie had been cast to play a part that was molded to create echoes of his existing public persona.

From his end, Bowie admired
Don't Look Now
and was excited to work with Roeg, although he forgot about their initial February 1975 meeting, and kept the director waiting for eight hours. The movie's story was familiar ground to Bowie, who had created the musical outer-space character Ziggy Stardust in 1972. “Ziggy really set the pattern for my future work,” Bowie said. “Ziggy was my Martian messiah who twanged a guitar. He was a simplistic character. I saw him as very simple . . . fairly like the character Newton I do in [
The Man Who Fell to Earth
] later on. Someone who's dropped down here, got brought down to our way of thinking, and ended up destroying his own self.”

The Man Who Fell to Earth
begins at the end of the visitor's long journey, as his space vehicle enters the Earth's atmosphere. We follow the vehicle's strange visitor as he assumes the identity of Thomas Jerome Newton, a British expatriate, and pawns gold rings brought from his planet to finance a trip to New York. In the Big Apple he hires patent attorney Oliver Farnsworth (Buck Henry) to form a company to sell his inventions, which are actually products from his home planet. They create a wildly successful communications company and generate millions of dollars, which Newton plans to use to launch his own space program for the dual purposes of returning to his family and saving Anthea by bringing back water. On his Bill Gates-like journey he meets Nathan Bryce, a lecherous college professor, and begins an affair with Mary-Lou (Candy Clark), a drunken motel maid. Suspicion grows in tandem with his sudden rise to prominence. Betrayed by friends, his extraterrestrial origins are uncovered. An enigmatic government agency kidnaps him and carries out a battery of tests to ascertain who, or what, he is. Newton's space program is dismantled, and he is cut loose. Alone and frustrated, with no means to return home, he turns to drink.

Capturing
The Man Who Fell to Earth
on film presented some unusual challenges for the rock star. The three-month shoot, mostly on-location in New Mexico, was an exhausting affair, with Bowie having to rise at 4 a.m. to attend a five-hour makeup call each day. The long shoot did have one upside, however — the remoteness of the location cut Bowie off from his usual drug dealers, and by the end of the shoot he was almost free of the debilitating drug habit that had plagued him in recent years.

One peculiar story from the production log begs for an explanation, although it seems not to be drug related. While shooting on an old Aztec burial ground, something inexplicable happened. Bowie was drinking a glass of milk on set when he noticed “some gold liquid swimming around in shiny swirls inside the glass.” Production had to be shut down for the next two days when the actor fell ill. After running tests, doctors could not determine any cause for the ailment, even though six witnesses testified that they had seen a foreign substance in the bottom of the glass. Powerless to explain the story, Bowie chalked up the entire experience to “very bad Karma.”

The Man Who Fell to Earth
isn't a typical science-fiction film. Roeg doesn't rely on special effects to dazzle; he doesn't have to, he already has David Bowie. As Newton, Bowie is an organic special effect — otherworldly, androgynous, and mysterious. But it is the unspoken emotion, the heart and soul of his character that shines through in his performance. In the book Newton has no fingernails, has a waist that measures only five inches and is over six feet tall. No amount of makeup could perfectly reproduce that effect, but Bowie's physicality is ideal; he's pallid, gaunt, with a bone structure that is reminiscent of the popular, large-eyed image of aliens. Trying to imagine anyone else in the role is like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. It just can't be done.

If you want action, rent
Independence Day
or
The Terminator
, but if you like idea-based sci-fi check out Newton's story.
The Man Who Fell to Earth
is a parable showing the clash between decadent Western culture and Newton's simple, innocent alien life, and how he ends up losing his purity of heart. This was a particularly potent message in the mid-'70s, hot on the heels of Vietnam and at the beginning of globalization. Newton's Icarus story is a warning — fly too close to the sun, and you'll fall to Earth in flames.