On Screen
ASAHINA, ROBERT
On Screen MAD DOCTORS BY ROBERT ASAHINA A JL jL deranged doctor named Eddie Jessup desperately seeks God, discovers psychedelic mushrooms instead and turns into an ape. After running amok, he...
...Lawrence Dane is appropriately nasty as Keller, the traitor within Con Sec, a man you immediately love to hate...
...And despite his being well over six feet tall, for some reason he affects stooped shoulders and meekly cupped hands in Scanners...
...T JL...
...The three story lines intersect in sometimes amusing but more often predictable ways, as the characters are alternately rewarded and punished (particularly with psychosomatic disorders) for their behavior...
...The interaction of mind and "body" has rarely been depicted so cleverly on film...
...Still, the effect of all this is to give more dimension to thecharacter than Cronenberg's sometimes confusing script does...
...These "scanners" can even make their victims' heads explode like overinflat-ed, blood-filled balloons...
...All the while, the good doctor is comparing them to laboratory rats and, sure enough, everything supports his thesis that pleasure and pain make the world go round, that the "unconscious" is really the sum of past experiences, and that the basic human motive is "always to dominate others...
...The population of Canada (where the movie was made) apparently includes 236 people with telepathic and teleki-netic powers able to cause nosebleeds, loss of muscular control and heart failure...
...Stephen Lack, new to me, plays the 237th scanner with the right amount of confusion and paranoia...
...The same could be said of the atavistic main character, or all those unspecial effects, not to mention the film itself...
...Jean, an ambitious cultural bureaucrat belatedly learning about backstab-bing, is suffering a midlife crisis...
...Based on the novel of the same title by Paddy Chayefsky, the film gives ample evidence of his heavy hand, although he withdrew his name from the screenplay (now credited to a pseudonymous Sidney Aaron...
...Nor does his weirdness have the artificiality of an Eddie Jessup or the too real hubris of a Henri Laborit...
...Still, Emily announces that she finds Eddie a "fascinating bastard," albeit a little kinky in bed...
...That the filmmakers were motivated by a desire to "dominate" the audience I can believe, however, for Mon Oncle d 'A merique is an act of pure aggression on the part of the director and his collaborators, a deliberate affront to our intelligence...
...Ruth one of the most intriguing mad scientists since Dr...
...IntrueCha-yefskyan manner, the characters do not converse, they declaim, even in the midst of making love...
...Small wonder...
...Apart from its rather confusing first five minutes or so, Scanners is visually fluid, well-paced, and intelligently shot and edited...
...He thus turns what could have been a mindless bloodbath into a Hitchcock-like exercise in suspense...
...15 seconds: You can't breathe...
...He is cheating on his wife with Janine, a would-be actress who doesn't realize that histrionics are not confined to the stage and allows herself to be outma-neuvered by Jean's wife...
...Instead, there is a certain pathos to Mc-Goohan's performance that makes Dr...
...This is a ridiculously simplistic view of human nature, of course, made even sillier by the ponderous way Resnais announces it on screen...
...One hopes that Altered States will not blind casting directors to his talent...
...only the human is real...
...Naturally, forces of evil are systematically organizing them for nefarious ends...
...Ruth (Patrick McGoo-han), a psychopharmacologist working for a private weapons and intelligence conglomerate called Con Sec, has been keeping Vale (Stephen Lack), a 237th scanner, under wraps...
...truth is transitory...
...After running amok, he destroys his lab and thoroughly frightens everybody before discovering that love is the answer to his existential questions...
...The three principal characters??Jean Le Gall (Roger-Pierre), Janine Garnier (Nicole Garcia) and Rene Ragueneau (Gerard Depardieu...
...Best of all is McGoohan as dear Dr...
...His experiences in the ensuing "ultimate moment of nothing that is the beginning of life" at last convince him "the final truth is that there is no final truth...
...He tries to give new meaning to that dated term "psychedelic" with airborne crucifixes, many-eyed rams, snakes descending from clouds, scores of naked bodies writhing in an inferno, human beings disintegrating into dust, rolling clouds, and crackling thunderbolts...
...Her idea of soothing his angst consists of reassuring him that "there are no great truths," a note to be sounded again in this none-too-subtle film...
...Undeterred by her common sense, Eddie decides to go down under: first in an isolation tank, where he floats naked in body-temperature water in an effort to encounter his "unborn soul...
...Ruth, who in Cronenberg's slightly twisted view of the world turns out not to be quite as sympathetic as he initially seemed...
...Jekyll...
...While he probes the computer over a telephone tie-in, Cronenberg takes us, closeup, inside the phone itself, then through the lines and relays into the computer, where the glowing microcircuits and chips surround us like architecture out of a weird dream of the future...
...McGoohan is a very mannered actor, with no lack of cocked eyebrows, clipped consonants, and eccentric readings and gestures that apparently work against his lines...
...Another mad scientist can be found in Alain Resnais' Mon Oncle d'Amer-ique, if you care to waste your time and money on this unintentionally hilarious Gallic farce...
...The doctor in question is Henri Laborit, a behavioral scientist seen in snippets from a documentarylike interview...
...then south of the border, where he joins in a ritual mushroom cookout with some turned-on Toltecs...
...By this time we are grateful the movie, too, is transitory...
...Brown, who has a lovely Jeanne Moreau-like ravaged face and a voluptuous body, manages to convince us that she really is one of those liberated superwomen (loving wife, devoted mother, sensual bedmate, and an eminent scientist to boot) who exist only in the pipe-dreams of hacks like Chayefsky...
...he ads for Scanners suggest, by contrast, that the filmmakers are trying to scare us to death: "10 seconds: The pain begins...
...and once more in the tub, where he mixes expanded consciousness with deprived senses, a potent combination that catapults him and us into a head trip that ludicrously becomes physical reality...
...I thought all that stuff went out with the '60s and Timothy Leary and all the other gurus," remarks Mason Parrish (Charles Haid), Eddie's skeptical colleague, about the mind-expanding experiments...
...20 seconds: You explode...
...Ruth is very far from the megalomania of the typical film Frankenstein or the cackling evil of the familiar demented doctor...
...But one Dr...
...Several good actors are totally wasted in their cartoonish roles...
...invoke their different "uncles" chiefly when frustrated by their hopelessly screwed-up lives...
...The comedy created by their ineptness notwithstanding, they are trying to bore us to death...
...Cronenberg, who directed a number of the better recent schlock horror films (The Brood and They Came From Within) is clearly a very gifted technician...
...If that summary of Ken Russell's AI-tered States doesn't sound very funny, it at least has the virtue of brevity: The movie itself alternates wildly between pseudoscience and pseudoprofundity for 102 minutes that seem more like three hours...
...Russell's direction is perfectly in keeping with Chayefsky/Aaron's purple prose and potted philosophy...
...In need of classified information stored in a computer, for example, Vale "reads" its memory banks as easily as people's minds...
...Propped up on his arms above his overheated wife-to-be, Emily (Blair Brown), Eddie(William Hurt)an-nounces that he's really been thinking about Him, not her...
...No irony is too cheap, no juxtaposition of human folly and "scientific" commentary too convenient for the Erector-Set director...
...More important, Cronenberg resists the temptation to go for the showy yet easy shocks that mark the work of the more publicized John Carpenter (Halloween...
...The sur- or hyper-realism here also puts to shame Ken Russell's efforts in Altered States (although Gary Zeller worked on the special effects for both films...
...Apparently he was convinced by his father's painful death many years ago that God does not exist: "The purpose of our suffering is only more suffering," he complains, adding, "I haven't told anyone about this for 10 years...
...Nevertheless, the film does have its interesting features...
...His reductionist musings about human motivation provide what is meant to be a wry running commentary on the fictional story unfolding before us...
...As Cronenberg gradually reveals the full extent and power of the scanner network, we slip into a deli-ciously spooky nightmare reminiscent of such genre classics as George Romero's The Crazies...
...Itisanactof kindness to say that the story, and particularly its literally mind-blowing climax, are implausible...
...The outcome is second-rate surrealism inspired by Dali and Magritte, assaulting our eyes and ears in a 70-millimeter Dolby light-and-sound show...
...Well, maybe not you, but the characters in this thriller, written and directed by David Cronenberg, are certainly put through all that and more...
...When the destructive activities of the others produce a trail of corpses across the continent, it is time to have Vale infiltrate their ranks and end the mayhem...
...Haid is a shade too energetic in his stubborn rationalism and skepticism, but at least his forcefulness??reminiscent of his masterly swaggering as Eddie Peace in Who 'II Stop the Rain ???provides some energy to a miserably undernourished and underwritten part...
...Rene, a stalwart pro vincial who has left his devoted wife behind to make a career in industry, is receiving an unpleasant education in managerial politics...
...The title refers not to a real uncle in America but to that proverbial relation, evidently a member of every French family, who emigrated to the States and struck it rich...
...Some nice bits of acting make the nonsense a little easier to swallow...
...And Hurt, although you would never know it from Altered States, since he has little to do but act slightly nutty and ever-so-intense, is one of our most gifted young actors...
...the film has one of those fragmented narratives that results less from esthetic considerations than from the desperate attempt to disguise banalities as deep thought...
...Resnais and his screenwriter, Jean Gru-ault, seem to have constructed the story only after deciding what they and La-borit wanted to prove...
...His performance as the crippled Vietnam vet in the original Circle Repertory production of Lan-ford Wilson's TheFifthoJ7h/v was truly memorable, promising a greatness that is sadly nowhere to be seen in this wretched film...
Vol. 64 • February 1981 • No. 3
