MOVIES
MOVIES Horrors Kenneth Turan English poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth engaged in a bit of friendly rivalry toward the end of the Eighteenth Century that is curiously relevant...
...Where Aliens opening shots of the sleeping spacemen were cool and reserved, Prophecy opens hot and heavy...
...With him is his young wife, pregnant but afraid to tell hubby...
...At the top of this monstrous heap, at least in terms of audience acceptance, are Ridley Scott's Alien and John Frankenheimer's Prophecy, and it is here that time spent with Wordsworth and Coleridge is particularly instructive...
...Unlike the crews of other cinematic space ships, often prissy to the point of somnolence, the gang on the Nostromo are scruffy and contentious...
...Designed by Swiss fantasy artist R.R...
...Hits and misses Escape From Alcatraz — a welcome return to form for Clint Eastwood, who has little to do except walk around and look ornery in this Don Siegel-directed prison film...
...On the other hand, the beast is ungallant enough to attack actress Sigourney Weaver in her underwear in the film's hyperthyroid finale...
...Goldengirl — Susan Anton vamps around in skintight shorts as a sweet young thing who has been psychologically programmed to win three Olympic sprints...
...Alien is good at this, accomplishing its purpose shrewdly and in a brief period of time...
...This is a case for a psychiatrist, not a critic...
...In the spirit of poetic jousting, the two men decided to write works that would be grounded in diametrically opposed premises...
...What might be called the Wordsworth school involves taking an ordinary situation familiar to every member of the audience and hiding a terrifying, unexpected element in it...
...With a plot — a flight through outer space — totally removed from everyday experience, the film depends on its ability to persuade the audience that the people involved are, appearances to the contrary, much like regular folks...
...The Main Event — Barbra Streisand, the most popular of female stars, an actress who could have her pick of roles, has chosen, to play an aggressively stupid woman who is abused and humiliated by everyone in sight...
...MOVIES Horrors Kenneth Turan English poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth engaged in a bit of friendly rivalry toward the end of the Eighteenth Century that is curiously relevant to the surge of horror films now turning movie theaters across the country into charnel houses...
...Bloodline — Audrey Hepburn is simply too classy-looking for such tepid trash and her presence in this marshmallow version of the Sidney Sheldon best seller throws an already unsteady film completely out of kilter...
...K.T...
...We next see this treacherous piece of timberland when a right-thinking young public health doctor arrives to help decide whether the land should be given back to the Indians or remain in the hands of a local lumber company...
...and Prophecy, which shows what can happen to nice, clean-cut families who go camping in the Maine woods, fits squarely into the same category...
...Wordsworth would take a commonplace situation and make it seem highly unusual, while Coleridge would take a highly unusual situation and make it seem as commonplace as possible...
...It also has a penchant for changing size and shape, which makes its jack-in-the-box surprise appearances that much more disturbing...
...One does not love a movie like Alien, but one does respect it for what it can do...
...Actually, except for a few more clunkers on the order of "You were too busy playing god to be a human being," Prophecy is rather adept in the early and even the middle going...
...Anton looks the part, but besides being unable to act, she can't even run very well...
...It's so peaceful," she says, looking around joyously...
...Kenneth Turan reviews films regularly for The Progressive...
...The five-man, two-woman crew of the Nostromo, a cargo ship returning to Earth towing innumerable tons of mineral ore, may look like pristine beings as they sleep in white cubicles in the film's opening sequence, but they hardly act that way once they're awake...
...Like the monster it portrays, its efficiency is cold yet admirable...
...This is a ship with a pronounced caste system, with grumbling lower- class grease monkeys trading nasty remarks with "I'm just doing my job" higher-ups...
...Unseen it is horrifying enough, but the more often we see it, the less frightening it becomes, and by the time the climax rolls around the monster has become as familiar — and as nonthreatening — as an old, albeit misshapen, shoe...
...Unfortunately, Prophecy begins to unravel the first time we get a good look at the monster, a berserk mess that resembles a nightmare version of Smokey the Bear...
...As no less an authority than the cover of Newsweek has proclaimed, this is "Hollywood's Scary Summer...
...An evil we can see quite clearly is always less menacing than an evil we can't...
...This is really a shame, because Prophecy, rooted in shared everyday experience, has the potential for being both more frightening and more moving than the clinical Alien...
...Yet in the hands of director Ridley Scott, whose visual flair and imagination were obvious in The Duellists, the film succeeds...
...It is a deft humanizing device and, like everything else about the film, it works just as planned...
...Giger, it is a repulsive, sexually curious horror...
...Zombies pillage a shopping center and each other in Dawn of the Dead, nasty bats menace civilization as we know it in Nightwing, that never-say-die count rises once more from the grave in Dra-cula, and so on into the scary night...
...One of the best examples of a Coleridge film is the fabulously successful Alien, which grossed almost $22 million in its first month of release...
...Its human characters are more fleshed out than those of Alien and its point — that the lumber company's thoughtless use of mercury has been poisoning the local water supply and creating a generation of cranky mutants — is a natural in these times of ecological consciousness...
...While literary history tells us that Coleridge won the skirmish, his Rime of the Ancient Mariner having it all over Wordsworth's Michael, the point of view of each has become embodied in a distinct school of horror film making...
...Yet that picture, shrewder and more parsimonious in dispensing its shocks, ends up being easily more successful...
...But nobody's perfect...
...It may sound easy, but no one can walk around like Clint...
...The plot of Alien — a monstrous thing from space eats its way through the trusty crew — is old-fashioned and creaky and the script is filled with a scandalous number of illogical loopholes...
...Jaws is the classic Wordsworth film — who hasn't been to the beach...
...And you thought they didn't write lines like that anymore...
...Howling dogs and panting men are tracking something unseen in the dark Maine woods, and amidst a lot of yowling and growling and flashing lights the unknown horror manages to kill everything in sight...
...That monster is another reason for the film's success...
Vol. 43 • September 1979 • No. 9
