An American Werewolf in London

David Naughton, Griffin Dunne, parkas: AWIL

An American Werewolf in London is a super title; it suggests an arch, off-the-wall approach to a certain film genre, but also manages to affectionately evoke older, much-beloved horror movies, like Werewolf of London. It also provides enough information for an audience to be fairly sure of what they’ll see (Although writer-director John Landis has reported this his favorite interview question he’s been getting asked is, “An American Werewolf in London…now, what’s that about?”).

Funny thing is, once our American friend (head Pepper David Naughton) gets out on the streets of London (the lucky dog is accompanied by Jenny Agutter), the inventiveness and spirit that Landis has displayed in the first part of the movie starts dribbling away. Almost as though the title, finally, was enough; as though inspiration has been exhausted by the mere act of luring an audience into a theater (Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part 1, and Escape from New York are a couple of examples of this kind of thing: a wonderful premise for a movie—and audiences did come—gives way to the film itself turning out to be a lackluster disappointment).

Still, before Landis gets his werewolf to London, there is a good deal of fun to be had: two vacationing American boys disengage themselves from the back of a truck carrying sheep (“We’re gonna miss you guys”) and set off across the lonely moors of Northern England, with their backpacks and brightly colored down parkas distinguishing them as aliens in this world (a very striking, right touch). They don’t exactly seem like innocents abroad, however; in fact, they’re both likably wiseass. This is clearly a modern monster movie, not attempting to recapture the feel of old Universal horror films; still, Landis wants it to be scary as well as hip, and manages that up through Naughton’s stay in a London hospital (I won’t say what happened out there on the moors) where he has a really terrifying nightmare. In fact, this sequence—Naughton dreams his family is attacked by creatures from –well, from his own imagination—hints at ambitions in the film that are never quite confronted head on; could be Landis doesn’t want to risk bumming out his mostly teen audience, or maybe he’s just not ready to confront such issues within himself.

At any rate, most of the stuff that follows is pretty tame, and the finale is particularly disappointing. The ending is vaguely reminiscent of Altered States; though at that ending, Ken Russell had the delirious courage to back up Chayefsky’s contention that Love is the civilizing and conquering factor over darkness. Landis doesn’t seem to know quite what to do with a similar situation, and the movie just sort of stops. Or should we take this ending—the werewolf cannot answer a woman’s cry of love—as an autobiographical confession on Landis’s part? The filmmaker as werewolf, compulsively howling and shocking, needing to grab our attention but unable to articulate his feelings? Okay, I’ll let it go, even though the werewolf in Werewolf literally does rampage and suck the blood from a Piccadilly movie audience. John Landis has provided some very enjoyable times in the last few years (Animal House and The Blues Brothers) and one hopes that he might reconcile his cleverness with the expression of that hint of ambition; although his next project, Dick Tracy, would not seem to encourage that prospect. Landis has shown enough so that we might expect more than just genre-tweaking revelations such as the fact that a silver bullet is actually not necessary to kill a werewolf.

First published in The Informer, September 1981

Head Pepper? David Naughton was indeed the star of a series of all-singing, all-dancing commercials for Dr. Pepper. It seemed sort of logical that he would get the lead off a movie after that, even if bigger stardom never happened. There’s a lot to be said for the film’s remarkable effects and that opening sequence with the guys in their down parkas, even if the mixed review seems sound. I always enjoy the armchair psychologizing of these reviews written by a 23-year-old – but hey, maybe Landis wasn’t ready to confront such issues within himself. He didn’t make Dick Tracy, at least.

Harry and the Hendersons

For some reason a full-scale treatment of the legend of Bigfoot has eluded Hollywood, except for quickie horror films and sleazy “In Search Of” pseudo-documentaries. Harry and the Hendersons sets this right; it’s a grade-A production, set in the Northwest, all about one family’s close encounter with the big hairy beast.

I invoke Close Encounters purposely. Harry was produced by Steven Spielberg’s production company, and like his Close Encounters, it describes a supernatural meeting in which the alien presence is benign and friendly.

The Hendersons run into their hirsute friend quite literally—the family station wagon sideswipes a moving mound of fur during an outing in the Cascades. Dad (John Lithgow), a sportsman who runs a Seattle sporting goods store, packs the carcass home, envisioning fame and fortune and the Carson show thanks to the discovery. Mom (Melinda Dillon, also the mother in Close Encounters) and the kids (Margaret Langrick, Joshua Rudoy) just want the smelly beast put in isolation.

Upon returning, they find the sasquatch feeling quite frisky, which results in a very funny sequence of Harry (as the creature is dubbed) making himself at home: raiding the fridge, readjusting the ceilings, solemnly burying Lithgow’s mounted deer heads in the backyard.

Lithgow gets the help of a crusty Bigfootologist (Don Ameche), but also the attention of a crazed hunter (David Suchet) who wants to blow the sasquatch away. After an extended—perhaps overextended—chase sequence, Lithgow must secure the beast’s safety.

The first third and last third of the film are charming and sweet. The middle meanders rather shapelessly, as though unsure of just how to spring the various plot mechanics into motion. Except for this sag, Harry is full of wonderfully cartoonlike sight gags, and a sly sardonic wit that helps defuse some of the overly saccharine moments.

The big triumph is Harry himself, a terrific creation by make-up man Rick Baker (An American Werewolf in London) and a 7-foot-2-inch actor named Kevin Peter Hall, who is inside the fur. Both men do outstanding work, and Harry is never less than endearing.

Director/co-writer William Dear (whose previous feature credit was Timerider) and producer Richard Vane were in town recently to promote the film, almost exactly a year after they filmed much of it here (in Seattle, Index, North Bend, and other sasquatch hangouts).

Dear originally hooked up with Spielberg to make a very funny episode of Spielberg’s TV series, “Amazing Stories,” called “Mummy Daddy.” A few days after delivering it, the phone rang; it was Spielberg, asking whether Dear had any ideas for a feature film.

Dear had been nursing the Bigfoot idea for a long time, and he jumped at the chance to do it with Spielberg. “Steven really challenged us to challenge ourselves,” says Dear. “He’s say, ‘Is this just a good gag, or also a good part of the story?'” Once filming started, however, Spielberg left the crew to their own devices. “He never even saw the dailies,” marvels Vane, referring to the in-progress film.

Perhaps the toughest production challenge was casting Harry. Dear always had Rick Baker pegged as the designer, but….”It was very, very important to find the right actor,” says Dear. “A mechanism, like E.T., wouldn’t have worked.” Says Vane, “We interviewed a lot of big people. But they weren’t actors. They were just big.”

Dear likes the basic normalcy of the set-up in Harry. “This is a real-life situation that has a bump in it,” he says. He still seems knocked out that his long-cherished project has actually been realized. “The phone call from Spielberg sounds very easy and very quick, but that’s after 25 years of being a filmmaker. I refer to it as my own ‘Amazing Story.’ It’s been a long time coming.”

First published in the Herald, June 4, 1987

It’s one of the many Seattle-themed titles included in “Celluloid Seattle: A City at the Movies,” now on exhibit at the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle. And while I haven’t actually watched this movie since it came out, apparently I liked it well enough at the time. Big man Kevin Peter Hall, who also played the title role in the two Predator pictures, died at age 35 in 1991.

After Hours

If Franz Kafka had ever made a movie, it might have looked something like After Hours, a nifty nightmare comedy that puts a guy through the kind of trial you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.

It begins innocently enough, with Paul (Griffin Dunne), a mild-mannered Manhattan word processor, re-reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer late one night at a coffee shop. A girl (Rosanna Arquette) across the table from him strikes up a conversation. He gets her phone number, goes home, gives her a call. She says come on over. She lives in Soho.

It’s almost midnight, but the girl was a knockout, so what the hey. He hops a cab, and his money blows out the window. This is an omen, but he chooses not to heed it. From that point on, his long night is full of disasters: Paul seems to have entered not Soho but some malevolent corner of the Twilight Zone.

The date with the girl doesn’t work out; neither does a possible fling with her kinky roommate, a sculptor (Linda Fiorentino) who favors Nazi nightclubs. But things get worse than mere sexual disappointment. Before the evening is over, Paul is threatened with a Mohawk haircut, heisted by a couple of thieves (Cheech and Chong), encased in a no-exit work of art, and chased down the streets of Soho by a vigilante mob who think he’s a cat burglar.

It may not sound like a laugh a minute, but that’s at least what it works out to. This black comedy has a sure feeling for the hilarity of this horrible situation. Martin Scorsese, who is much better known for making movies about nightmares without laughs (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull), uses a busy camera to suggest Paul’s disorientation, and he has an appropriately bizarre cast to fill out the marginal roles of this bad dream.

Among the denizens of this otherworldly arena are John Heard, as a sympathetic bartender who almost manages to help Paul escape from Soho, only to be thwarted by yet another catastrophic coincidence (the screenplay, by first-timer Joseph Minion, is full of them); Teri Garr, a waitress caught in a ’60s time warp; and Catherine O’Hara (late of “SCTV”) as a maniac ice-cream truck driver who befriends and then betrays Paul.

Those people are so good, you wish you could see more of them; the only drawback to After Hours is that the supporting players are all brief figures in Paul’s adventure and thus don’t get the kind of screen time that most of these actors deserve.

This is balanced by the watchability of Griffin Dunne, heretofore most notable as the decomposing friend in An American Werewolf in London. Dunne has been a producer as well as an actor. His producing credits include Chilly Scenes of Winter and Baby It’s You, both with partner Amy Robinson. They also produced After Hours.

Dunne comes across as genial, likable, wholly undeserving of his fate in the film. He’s got all the right qualities of a comedic leading man—not so much in the ability to act funny as the gift of just being funny. After Hours may or may not find the oddball niche it needs to survive in a market that rewards predictability, but it is certain that, for Dunne, a comedic career has been launched.

First published in the Herald, October 4, 1985

I dunne-o, maybe he was just more interested in producing and directing. That’s a very peculiar, funny collection of actresses, if you think about it, and kudos to Scorsese for making the mix.

Kaos

The oddest filmmaking method in the world may be that practiced by Italy’s Taviani brothers. The siblings, Paolo and Vittorio, write the screenplay together – then, when they’re on the set, they take turns directing: Paolo directs the scenes Vittorio wrote, Vittorio directs the scenes Paolo wrote.

I’m not sure how far we can believe this, but it sounds reasonable, because their films really do seem to be the products of a single, lucid consciousness. Their previous outing, The Night of the Shooting Stars (1981), is looking more and more like one of the strongest films of the decade.

Now they’ve come up with Kaos, which should enhance their reputation even further. It’s a three-hour collection of tales adapted from Luigi Pirandello short stories, all set among the Italian peasantry.

The first story, “The Other Son,” may be the best. It’s a stunning tale of an aging mother who yearns for word from two sons who have gone to American seeking work, while she ignores the grown son who still lives nearby, because he was the product of a rape.

It’s an amazing story, full of haunting details. By the end, when the woman rolls a pumpkin down a dusty road, the image has become charged with horror and bitterness. It’s a staggering moment.

The second segment, “Moonstruck,” is almost as good. It’s both a horror story and a love story. A newlywed wife learns of her husband’s terrible illness when the first full moon of their marriage arrives. He tells her to lock herself in their farmhouse, and ignore his cries outside.

It seems he became moonstruck when left outside one night as a baby, and ever since, has turned animalistic once a month. Having survived this first night, the wife decides on a unique domestic solution: When the next full moon comes, she will invite her former lover to stay with her in the house – merely as a protector, ahem – while the husband howls outside. This suggestive twist may seem to point the tale in the direction of a sex comedy, but the resolution is a surprise.

After these two stories, “The Jar” comes off as relatively trivial, a parable about vanity and proprietorship. Still, it’s nicely done.

“Requiem” is a stately story about an old man’s wish to be buried in his own ground, even though it really belongs to a strict landowner who refuses his peasants a cemetery.

The epilogue, “A Talk with Mother,” has Pirandello arriving at his hometown, where he remembers a story his mother told him about visiting a strange pumice island when she was a girl; the snow-white island, sloping down into the clear blue sea, is one of the movie’s most striking images.

In some poetic way, this memory allows him to say goodbye to his dead mother. It also reminds us about the power of storytelling, which is, after all, what Kaos as been about. Even within the stories themselves, the characters are always telling stories, and this is the ultimate value the Tavianis are celebrating.

First published in The Herald, May 2, 1986

Alas, the brothers’ next film was Good Morning, Babylon, an English-language misfire. I’d like to see this one again, especially that werewolf episode – speaking of which, has there been a more recent adaptation of the Pirandello story? I swear I have seen one, or perhaps the images from Kaos are still very fresh in my mind.

Johnny Dangerously/The Flamingo Kid

Two offbeat comedies are being released on the same day, just in time for the Christmas movie rush – and you can see why. The studio is hoping they’ll benefit from the general holiday upsurge in movie attendance, and help swell the fortunes of two somewhat hard­-to-sell items.

Johnny Dangerously features the star of Mr. Mom (Michael Keaton) and the director of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling), but its guiding spirit (although he had no actual involvement in the film) is Mel Brooks. This is a movie send-up a la Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, in which genre conventions are teased.

The Warner Bros. crime pictures of the 1930s are the raw material, and Johnny Dangerously is very much in the mold: Keaton is the street kid who stumbles his way into the syndicate; Griffin Dunne (last seen as a decomposing corpse in An American Werewolf in London) is his brother, who grows up on the right side of the tracks, no thanks to their salty mom (Maureen Stapleton).

Johnny becomes the kingpin of crime (with accompanying songbird/moll, Marilu Henner), while his brother is the crusading district attorney, who sends him to the chair. Everybody speaks in delicious James Cagney phrases: “Yeah – I like da sounda dat,” or “Who’s da nightingale? She sure sings good.” The writers have watched a lot of movies.

It’s also got its share of anachronistic humor, in the Mel Brooks tradition. Prison inmates eat quiche and sushi. Johnny break­-dances in 1930 (“Gee Johnny, I never seen that kinda dancin’ before”). A fat mobster insists he is about to start the Cambridge diet.

The jokes are like the machine guns that rattle away: More miss than hit. When in doubt, go for the human anatomy jokes – and this film, in a brief self-help newsreel that Keaton shows his brother, dwells on certain body parts that have rarely been dwelled on in legit films be­fore. Enough said on that.

What darn near carries the whole thing is the jaunty perfomance by Michael Keaton, who is confident throughout. He seems to have been born to live in a Warner Bros. film, and his movements recall Cagney in their cocky grace.

The Flamingo Kid is a more conventional film, but it’s also something of a special case among comedies – which is to say, it doesn’t rely on gross-out jokes in place of humor. As a modest growing-up piece, set in 1963, it’s a nice try, but it doesn’t really have anything new to say, and it runs out of gas long before it’s over.

Matt Dillon plays a Brooklyn kid who wangles a job at a swank Long Island country club where he meets a girl (Janet Jones), with whom he gets hot and bothered, and a gin player (Richard Crenna) who takes him under his wing to teach him the cutthroat nuances of gin rummy and life in general.

There are some nicely observed family dynamics (Dillon’s dad, Hector Elizondo, doesn’t like the capitalist pig Crenna putting ideas in his son’s head), but the film is finally about too many things: the girl, the game, the mentor, the family, the gang. It doesn’t spend much time on any of them, and director Garry Marshall (creator of TV’s Happy Days) can’t decide which element he wants to emphasize.

Dillon is better than he has been (he’s a little sunnier than usual) but there’s just not much to go on here. I doubt if even a Christmas bonus is going to help the Kid much.

First published in the Herald, December 22, 1984

I didn’t mention Joe Piscopo in my JD review, so apparently the then-popular SNL star did not make a big impression. I remember it as a really terrible movie. The Flamingo Kid, however, I remember more fondly than my review would suggest – a nice laid-back Florida feel to this film, I think, less constructed as a joke machine than many of Garry Marshall’s pictures.