The Films of 2011: Don't Be Afraid of the Dark

Co-written by one of my genre heroes, Guillermo Del Toro, and directed by Troy Nixey, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2011) is an elaborate remake of a 1973 TV movie of the same name.  

The meat of my review of the original establishes that Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is:

"...essentially the tale of a woman trapped in an unhappy and lonely marriage...and slowly but surely losing her grasp on reality (see also: Something Evil).

Sally's husband is mostly absent, and treats her as though she's a slow-witted child. All Alex cares about is that she's the "perfect hostess" for a dinner party, and the film functions literally as a metaphor of an unhappy marital relationship. Little things - literally, little monsters - keep getting in the way of the relationship, driving a wedge between the couple.

The terrifying notion at the heart of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is the opening of a Pandora's Box, the fear of breaking down a wall and releasing something that can't be put back in its place.

Again, without putting too fine a point on it, there's a psychological equivalent to this Pandora's Box (the fireplace...) in the film too."

The 2011 remake fails so egregiously because it takes a relatively simple and yet resonant tale (as diagrammed in the excerpt above) and then heaps more and more unnecessary story detail atop it.  

In other words, this movie does what all bad remakes feel the inexplicable need to do: it embellishes and embellishes until a once-sturdy foundation can no longer support the weight of all the new additions.

Consider: the original film concerned a country estate that was impressive, but not colossal or overwhelming, and involved little monsters about whom the audience knew almost nothing.  They were little devils, certainly, and they wanted to drag poor Kim Darby's Sally into a furnace...and perhaps Hell itself. 

That's pretty much everything.

But that simple blueprint is not enough for the re-told story.

In the spirit of Jan De Bont's The Haunting (1999), the reasonably-proportioned country estate of the original has been turned into a Goliath mansion of impossible interior decoration and dimension.

This mansion interior is so ornate, so over-sized that it would be difficult to imagine such a place actually existing in our reality.  It is a fantasyland castle. This problem in presentation and tone is exacerbated, in fact, by the film's very first shot.  We open with a CGI view of the mansion exterior in the past, in the 1880s. The view is abundantly phony, and immediately colors the film as fantasy, rather than as horror.

Reality is absent from frame one.

Beyond the fantasyland coloring and dimensions of the mansion in the new Don't Be Afraid of the Dark,  the film slathers on more detail, more exposition, and more background.The audience endures a lengthy prologue revealing the monsters, the monsters' lair in the furnace, their 19th century victims, and their peculiar need for childrens' teeth.

Later in the film, the star's protagonist, Kim (Katie Holmes) visits a library and a special collection that explains the rest of the monsters' story.  The creatures are historical "fairies" who require children and their teeth to replenish their dwindled numbers.

We see artwork of the monsters, and learn of their interactions with the historical papacy in Europe.  The only thing we don't get is a specimen for our own personal dissection.

All of these informational, spoon-fed touches are absolutely antithetical to the generation of suspense and terror in horror cinema.

A good general rule of thumb in horror is that the less we know about certain elements of a narrative (namely what the monsters are, and what, precisely they want), the more successful the film is. 

Horror rests in not-knowing, in ambiguity.

Why? Because that's the essence of human life.

We don't always understand why fate chooses us to suffer, or why bad things -- such as a car crash, or diagnosis of cancer -- occur.  The good horror movies reflect such real life ambiguity by not sharing absolutely everything about their menace, whether that menace is Michael  "The Shape" Myers, the birds of Bodega Bay, or the xenomorph in Alien (1979). 

Mystery enhances horror; knowledge diminishes it.

Conceptually, this remake just never surpasses this needy, continuous desire to make everything bigger, more elaborate, and more-spelled-out than the original. If you look at such classics as Psycho, Halloween and The Blair Witch Project, you understand the fallacy of such thinking. We don't require impossible interior decoration to be scared. We don't have to know the 'why' of a monster's behavior, either.

But I should be absolutely clear about this fact: Don't Be Afraid of the Dark doesn't even work on its own terms; even if you don't take the original into consideration.

The problem is sloppy writing. The story just doesn't hold together, and the film will have you screaming over its multitudinous oversights and missed opportunities.

For instance, late in the film, the young heroine, Sally (Bailee Madison), is trapped in a dark library with the rampaging monsters.  She battles them valiantly, while outside the library, the dinner guests of her father, Alex (Guy Pearce) try to break in and rescue her. 

At this point in the narrative, everyone believes Sally is merely a disturbed or troubled child, and that the monsters are figments of her troubled imagination.

Eventually, the dinner guests break into the library, but not before Sally crushes one of the creatures against a library book shelf.  We see a severed arm fall to the floor as the monsters scurry away into darkness. Instead of showcasing this rather dramatic evidence of her questionable story about monsters, Sally proffers a blurry photo, which is never revealed to the audience. 

So why doesn't Sally show the disbelieving adults, including her father, the severed arm? 

Incontrovertible proof of monsters would have absolutely supported the child's case at this juncture. You can be damn sure that if I were trying to make people believe I had seen a monster, I'd be waving around that severed arm to the high heavens.

This is only one problem of internal logic and consistency.

Another involves the monsters themselves.  Throughout the film, there are perhaps a half-dozen of them.  Just a handful.

But then suddenly -- and conveniently in time for the over-the-top climax -- there are literally dozens.

Where did the rest come from?  Where were they hiding during the rest of the film?  Lounging in the underworld?

If your population's survival depends on accomplishing one task, such as stealing a child, do you leave the bulk of your army languishing in the furnace until the last minute?

And if the purpose of stealing Sally and dragging her down into the furnace is indeed to replenish the monsters' dwindled numbers, then how the heck did there get to be so many of these hobgoblins down there in the first place?

The surfeit of monsters in the climax undercuts the monster's established motivation: the desperate need to reproduce. By elaborating so fully about the monsters and their needs, the movie writes itself into a corner. When suddenly a dozen monsters appear, it doesn't ring true; it smacks of gimmickry.

Thirdly, the finale of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark sees a character dragged down into the furnace; down, down underground, into a seemingly endless (but navigable...) tunnel of dirt, clay and earth.

In the original TV movie, Sally was dragged down into the furnace when nobody else was nearby...so no one saw where she went and could rescue her.  She just...disappeared.  Her husband might easily have believed she had left him; that she had run away.

But here, two characters witness a family member dragged down into the hole, and do absolutely nothing in terms of follow-up.

In this day and age, the police would surely have excavators and work crews ripping up that basement to rescue the missing citizen in short order. 

Why doesn't Alex call the local fire crew and report that one of his family members has fallen down a deep hole, and that he requires assistance rescuing her? 

Seriously, would you leave a loved one down in a hole, and make no attempt to rescue him or her, especially if he/she was alive (and kicking...) when falling in?

I realize, of course,  that Alex can't immediately follow the missing family member down the hole himself, because he has another family member to look after, and he may consider the danger from the monsters far from over.

But he could drive away, make a cell phone call, drop off the family member, and go back and save the missing person from the well.  It makes absolutely no sense that this doesn't occur.  This is  yet another example of embellishing a story to the point that it can't stand up on its own.

Grievous errors of internal consistency and believability occur again and again in Don't Be Afraid of the Dark.

A groundskeeper,  Mr. Harris, fights off the monsters about mid-way through the film.  They get into his toolbox and go at him with scissors, a utility knife, and other deadly implements.  He manages to escape, climb the basement stairs, and seek help from Sally and the housekeeper.  He still has scissors jutting out of his shoulder. 

Well -- incredibly -- the police, and Sally's Dad write off all of this carnage as a "work accident."  Really?  Scissors jutting out of the neck? Bloody cuts all over the man's body? 

And it was a workplace accident?  

Boy do I hate it when horror movies pull this shit, one of the dumbest of all genre movie tropes.  Nobody in their right mind would believe the attack was an "accident," but all the characters in the film automatically assume the unbelievable instead of the patently obvious.

Another flaw worth mentioning: Alex and Kim have been re-fitting and restoring this historic mansion for months. They have sunk their financial fortune into this task. There are groundskeepers and workers all over the premises, working around the clock for a photo-shoot in Architectural Digest.

You'd assume the couple has actually seen the original blueprints of the home if they are so enmeshed in an authentic restoration process, right?  Yet, a little girl, Sally, wanders onto the premises and on her second day there discovers a heretofore unknown basement!  Something architects, landscapers, painters, and historians all missed.

Again, all sense of reality just crumbles, and horror must possess a level of reality before layering on the scares.

Then, of course, there are flaws here originating from the fact that the remake attempts to be "faithful" to the original in some misguided way.

In the climax of the original TV film, for instance, Sally utilized the flash of a Polaroid camera to try to injure the photo-sensitive beasts.  At that point in history (the 1970s), Polaroid cameras were commonplace, so the idea was pretty clever.  Sally used what was on hand to inventively attempt to save herself. 

In the remake, Sally's Dad is a collector of Polaroid cameras (!) so that there happens to be one on hand to fight the ghouls; one which possesses seemingly endless flash capacity.  But here, the Polaroid is such a damn stupid thing to use. If you were Sally, in this film, would you decide to use the ammo-limited Polaroid camera to fight these light-sensitive monsters, or would you pick up a flashlight ,which projects a steady stream of light and is pretty unlimited in terms of duration, assuming new batteries? 

Of course Sally keeps snapping pictures with the camera...instead of acting logically and using the flashlight.

Again, contextually-speaking, the Polaroid made sense in the original.  It was an inventive weapon of last resort.  But it's resurrected here in a context that is nonsensical.

Finally, the ending of the new Don't Be Afraid of the Dark doesn't make sense in terms of the background story the characters have been told about the monsters.

The audience has specifically been notified that the fairies want to take children to replenish their small numbers.  At the end of the film, the monsters abduct somebody, but it isn't a child, and yet they add her to their ranks.  She is transformed into a monster (off-screen). 

How does this work, precisely?  Aren't kids the the magic bullet?   Why bother to laboriously explain the rules of these monsters' existence, if your movie isn't even going to stick to them?

All of these problems established, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is impressive in a few regards.  The movie boasts a humdinger of a jump scare involving a monster underneath Sally's bed covers.

Alas, if you've watched the film's trailer, you've already seen this bracing moment.  It's a major plot point -- the reveal of the monster -- and the impact of it is utterly ruined by the preview trailer.  I can't blame this issue on the film makers, but they must have surely been disappointed to see their big "boo!" moment ruined by advance advertisements.

Still, the monsters have been (masterfully) designed with a faithful eye towards the original creatures.  The gnomes/trolls are much more convincing and real here, and are genuinely scary in movement and look.  The wee beasts scurry around, and are truly malevolent, hateful little things.  You come to fear them.  And if you look closely at their faces...they share visages with their TV-movie counterparts.

Also, I can readily detect how this update attempts to craft a new and meaningful story about a child's alienation from parents, rather than the original's commentary on spousal alienation.

Little Sally is not really wanted by her mother or father, and is shifted about from house-to-house with little thought.  She is warned to be "gluten free" and take her "Adderall," dialogue points which convey the idea that her parents don't want to be bothered with her. 

 Just take your behavior-modification medicine, and shut up. 

Given this leitmotif, Sally's bed in the impossibly ornate mansion is represented as a kind of gilded, golden cage, and that's the point.

The child possesses everything (material) a kid could want, except love and affection.  So when those monsters tell Sally that "they [meaning her parents] don't want you, but we do," the line carries some resonance and power.   We all want to be with people who love us.  The monsters manipulate Sally at first to make her believe they care for her, and the attempted corruption of a child is indeed frightening.

I suspect this element of the film explains Del Toro's involvement. He has almost universally featured children in his films and always evidenced a dramatic sensitivity towards a child's point of view.  The same is true here. The jump scare I mentioned above works so well because it involves a universal dread. As children, we all imagined strange worlds beneath our bedtime blankets. Sally explores one such world here, and it is monstrous, nightmarish and recognizable to our collective subconscious.

Yet even the conceit of a "lonely child's world" is carried out unevenly, as Sally is shunted to the periphery, and Kim becomes the main character.

Does she have the mettle to be a Mother?  What about her own tough childhood? 

These new ideas are half-developed, and the final resolution of the story is not nearly as powerful as it should be because the movie spends so little time developing the growing bond between Kim and Sally.

The real question to consider: is this Sally's story, or is it Kim's?  The movie doesn't ever truly decide.  If this were a legitimate fairy tale, Sally would likely end up with the beasts in the furnace, finally finding her sense of "belonging" there which would serve as a lesson to all parents who neglect their children.

You either care for your kids and give them attention...or they could end up a monster.

A shame this movie doesn't have the gumption to follow through with its theme, and go in that unsettling direction.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark showcases dramatically all the common fallacies of modern horror remakes. It girds a simple story with too many bells and whistles, and it plays it safe in terms of its final act, sparing the child and spoiling the story.

Embellishing isn't necessarily improving, and the new Don't Be Afraid of the Dark gets so big and fat, it forgets to tell a story that makes sense, or that is capable of truly disturbing our slumber.  

The original 1973 telemovie did so much more with so much less.

Cult-Movie Review: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Over the last several years, I've become something of a pragmatist in terms of horror movie remakes.  

There are so many of 'em out there that the only to broach them fairly -- and at least relatively objectively --- is to take them on a case-by-case, individual basis. 

So I try to find the good where I can, even if it is a re-vamp of a classic that is under the spotlight. 

And facts are facts: "remakes" of The Thing (1982), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Nosferatu (1979) and The Fly (1986) remain some of the  best horror films ever made.  

You might even add 1988's The Blob to that select list too.

Given this reality, it makes no sense to boast a blanket philosophy against horror movie remakes. You take the risk of dismissing something good if you do. 

The problem is that there are so many remakes that it's indeed difficult to distinguish the wheat from the chaff.

What I've detected, in broad strokes is that the best ones appear to be those that replace the original's sub-text with an updated, relevant one. 

In other words, the remakes must reveal something valuable to us about our lives in the here-and-now.  They can't just be disposable "jump" and "jolt" roller-coaster rides.

In other words, a remake can't be the "same" movie as the original because times have changed and different talents are involved.  But if a remake excavates a comparative path to quality -- gazing at our world  as it is now; pushing the boundaries of today's cinema, etc. -- then it very may well offer something worthwhile to commend it.

I believe that Marcus Nispel's Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead (2004) and Alexandre Aja's The Hills Have Eyes (2006) all fit this bill. 

Are these remade titles all-time classics like the originals from which they sprang? 

Only time can answer that question for certain. 

But I think, at the very bare minimum, they are good movies that honor the memory of the originals and also boast their own distinctive visual and contextual identity.

This is a very long preamble to a discussion of the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010). 

But I believe it is abundantly necessary to spell this all out, in meticulous detail, because this is one case in which a remake is unremittingly awful.

I didn't want my distaste for this movie to be erroneously perceived as a complaint against the remake form in toto.  It's too easy to dismiss my review if that were the case, and I don't want that to happen. 

Long story short: Samuel Bayer's A Nightmare on Elm Street is shallow, poorly-made, and wholly lobotomized -- yes, downright stupid -- compared to the Wes Craven, 1984 source material.  

The remake fails to scare; it fails, even, to generate interest around its by-the-numbers "investigative" story line.  More than anything, the movie plays like a bad remake of  an obscure J-Horror, like One Missed Call, perhaps.

Of course, the new Nightmare on Elm Street cannot be the old one.  

I don't expect it to be.  

But it fails on the creative basis I wrote about above. It doesn't replace what was so good about the original Craven film with anything of comparative value or quality. The remake fundamentally misunderstands the original's point-of-view and is a pale, play-it-safe, white-bread effort.  It pushes no boundaries in terms of the genre. It is a dull, unimaginative piece of work.

Let's talk a bit about the original Nightmare on Elm Street for a moment. 

I often describe Wes Craven as the genre's social conscience, and his first Freddy Krueger film is Exhibit A.  The 1984 film is not merely about a dream killer stalking teenagers; it's about something much deeper in human nature.  In particular, A Nightmare on Elm Street concerns the idea that it is a sin to bury the truth -- no matter how painful -- and far better to face it...to dig it up and show it the sunlight.

Wes Craven gets at this important idea in a few significant ways.  The parents of Elm Street (who murdered Freddy), lie to their children, like Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp), about their crime, and so the sins of the fathers -- the lies -- return to impact the children. 

We see the price of denial and repression all through the film. The Thompsons have divorced. Nancy's mother hides in the bottle -- she's an alcoholic -- so she doesn't have to face the truth about the vigilante action against Krueger.

Unlike her parents, Nancy digs and prods at the truth to save her own life. She won't hide from the truth about Krueger, and Craven draws a cerebral comparison in the original film (in an English high school class, no less), between Nancy and Shakespeare's Danish prince, Hamlet. 

Both characters seek the truth about "their fathers,"  even though those truths are uncomfortable.

Society wise, this dynamic also reflects dramatically what was happening in political America in the mid-1980s. Ronald Reagan, an avuncular, father-figure was by-and-large telling Americans that they could have it all. They could have tax cuts and spend heavily on defense and not cut entitlements; and there would be no consequence, said Reaganomics. There was a heavy price, of course: the deficit ballooned dramatically.

Again, the sins of the father were being visited upon the children. 

Who would pay down the national debt?  The children of Elm Street all over America.

Genetically-encoded in A Nightmare on Elm Street is this notion of a battle between Americans generations.  The generation that denies and represses the truth (the middle class parents of Nancy's Elm Street; the Establishment of the Eighties) and the younger generation, which would hopefully learn to do better and grapple with problems rather than pawn them off to their own kids, a generational IOU.  

"I'm into survival," Nancy notes at one important point in the original film, and this is critical commentary about the times.  As youngsters of that era (and I was close to the same age as Nancy in 1984...) many of us indeed worried about our survival. 

This was an important turning point in the development of the character of the Final Girl in the Slasher Movie Paradigm. Nancy took responsibility for defending herself; and for beating the Boogeyman.

The point of this discussion, I suppose, is that -- if you so choose -- you can gaze at Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street on multiple layers.  As a frighteningly good horror film; as, thematically, the idea that things repressed return as symptoms...and must be faced.  Or, as a political point about the context under which the film was produced: the so-called "apocalypse mentality" of the 1980s. 

Through Wes Craven's careful layering of elements (including literary allusion to Hamlet), the film opens itself up to interpretation and analysis.  It becomes about "something" other than a guy with finger knives, slicing and dicing nubile teenagers. 

In terms of structure -- and the act of  pushing the horror film format forward -- Craven blended the naturalistic-style Slasher Paradigm of the early 1980s with "Rubber Reality," infusing "knife-kill' horror  with the supernatural.  That was a big deal at the time, and it opened the way for rubber reality horrors such as Hellraiser (1987) and even Candyman (1992).

So here comes the remake in 2010, and instead of similarly commenting on our society now, it plays it safe and sound in every regard, and actually subverts the messages and meaning of the original film.

How does this movie play it safe? 

Well, consider how characters have changed since 1984 to become more timid, more bland. In the original film, Nancy's mother was an alcoholic because she buried the truth and could not face her own actions. Here she is not an alcoholic. Connie Britton plays a concerned mother who counseled against killing Freddy.  

See, she's reasonable and nice, not a law breaker, not a vigilante, and certainly not a heavy drinker! 

In the original film, Rod was a legitimate juvenile delinquent -- a "rough" kid.  Here, his replacement, played by Thomas Dekker, is not. He's just another typical suburban kid; one who happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.  In the original film, people believed Rod could be guilty of Tina's murder because he was a bad boy "from the wrong side of the tracks;" because he had a history, and because he was deemed unacceptably lower class by the middle class.  

Not here.  

In the original film, the parents of Elm Street are depicted as outright negligent.  Remember Tina's Mom and her boyfriend, and how he asked "are you comin' back to the sack or what?" while Tina was facing the prospect of a terminal nightmare?  

That's all changed here too.  Tina's surrogate -- Kris -- faces the exact some death as Tina, but there are two important differences.  

First, her mother is not negligent; she's just a stewardess who needs to go to work, to take a flight.

And secondly, Kris does not have premarital sex before she dies (as Tina did, with the "bad boy," Rod.)

So this is a far more timid, milquetoast, safe depiction of the American middle class.  No parental negligence. No alcoholism.  No class warfare. No premarital sex, even. 

But the most important and sickening change apparent in the remake is that this Nightmare on Elm Street believes it is absolutely okay (and even commendable) that the parents of Elm Street have lied to their children about the truth of their pre-school age-abuse at Freddy's hands, and his subsequent murder.  

Where the original film was about digging and excavating the truth, no matter what, this film is about keeping the unpleasant things down and out of sight.  

At the end of the film -- I shit you not -- Nancy actually thanks her Mother for lying to her (to...her...face) about Freddy. 

 "I know you were just trying to protect me.  Thank you," she says. 

So the new A Nightmare on Elm Street totally undercuts the very theme of the original; the meaning of Nancy's journey.  

That's established.  The question becomes: what does it replace that theme with?

Well, nothing really.  

The new film doesn't work on multiple levels at once.  It doesn't even work on one simple level actually; it's not remotely scary.  As far as I'm concerned that's the base-line for a horror movie.  It must scare.  It must excite.  It must get the blood pumping.

On that front, this remake tips its hand in the first five minutes, revealing Freddy in close-up during a "micro-nap" in a diner.  Remember how the original film kept Freddy in the shadows, giving the audience only glimpses of the dream avenger? 

Even that sense of artistry and patience is gone.  We know who we're up against from the get-go -- before the title card, actually -- and exactly what he looks like too.  True, this Freddy does look more like a burn-victim and less like a Halloween witch, but I'm not totally certain that's a fair trade.  After all, Freddy is supposed to be a supernatural avenger, not merely a walking corpse.   

Of course, one might argue legitimately that everyone knows who Freddy is by now, so the remak-ers had to show him -- full make-up monty-- early on and get it out of the way.  I disagree: going into a remake a director/writer/producer can't just take as a given that the movie's Bogeyman villain is so well-known that he's not scary.   

On the contrary, the mission is to re-invent him so he is scary again.  Generating real horror requires patience. We should build up to Freddy's appearance; experience a sense of anticipation in his absence. What's he going to look like, now?

And this is not an impossible task, either. Wes Craven accomplished this task well, re-inventing Freddy as a kind of Uber-Evil for Wes Craven's New Nightmare in 1994.  Explicitly, he connected Freddy to antecedents in the genre like Nosferatu (1922) and the story of Hansel and Gretel.  In this way, we understood that his brand of evil had always been with us.

So I don't ask for the impossible here, only that the movie provide us a new Freddy who is as terrifying to us today as the original was in '84, or in the re-imagined 1994 film. 

I should hasten to add, other directors have accomplished this task as well.  The zombies in Dawn of the Dead (2004) were rendered new and scary by their frightening speed, and a twist in their life cycle (only a bite passes the infection, not death in general).  And the clan of the new The Hills Have Eyes actually consisted of mutants; those who had been exposed to atomic testing in the desert.  That new wrinkle fit into the remake's argument about American international power, and Red and Blue States in the era of the War on Terror. 

In all these cases,  significant alterations to a classic "monster" (or group of monsters) were broached, but something imaginative was substituted for the old.  

Nothing imaginative is substituted in A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010).  Freddy talks a lot, but cracks fewer jokes.  This sort of makes him dull, and less scary too.  Now he's debating about "what he wants" from the teens before killing them?  

Let's just have a conference call while we're at it.

In terms of the teen characterizations, the new Elm Street is a disaster.  In the original film, audiences strongly identified with Langenkamp's Nancy.  She was a brave kid, digging and probing to learn the truth, and dealing with Freddy...even engineering booby traps to stop him. 

But we also identified with her because she was a regular kid, and the movie featured scenes with Nancy and her friends just being kids.  Remember the scenes at Glenn's (Johnny Depp's) house in which they goofed off with a boom box and a sound effects tape?  These scenes reminded us how young they were; and how precious their lives were.  

For god's sake, -- premarital sex or not -- they were innocent kids.

The new movie never once shows Freddy's would-be-victims acting like people or teenagers we can identify with.  They are morose, pale, fatalistic and imperiled from the movie's first shot.  They are undistinguished and uninteresting in the extreme.  If this is an accurate reflection of kids today, then we're really in trouble. They can google and text, all right, but not crack a smile, or apparently get a tan either.

The new Nightmare on Elm Street also lacks the slightly-seamy, lower-class vibe, and especially the energy of Craven's original.  This movie is so dull, it's the audience who longs for a micro-nap. 

It's true that the movie re-stages all of the "trademark" moments of the original film: Tina's death, the body bag dragged by invisible hands, Rod's death in a jail cell, the final sting-in-the-tail/tale with Nancy's Mom, the boiler room locale, and Nancy in the bath-tub with the Freddy glove.  But it gives these moments no psychic weight, no importance, no relevance.  

We've seen these moments before.  What's the twist? 

Again, look at how Dawn of the Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Hills Have Eyes played with expectations, and changed up the set-pieces of the varied source material.

Here it's, it's as if the studio made A Nightmare on Elm Street's "Greatest Hits" movie, but forgot to tell an interesting story, with interesting, human characters, within a context that is meaningful to us now.  The movie's opening dream set-piece is a prime example of how this film and the sterling original are determinedly different...and not in a good way.

In the first, original film, we see Tina (Amanda Wyss) emerging from a white light in a long, dank tunnel.  She is vulnerable, in her pajamas...and alone.  She walks towards us down that long hallway, and a lamb inexplicably crosses her path. It's all slightly unreal, with strong dream imagery. The corridor and light symbolize the tunnel, perhaps, between the dream world and the real world, and lamb is innocence being led to the slaughter. 

 The images mean something beyond a pure surface level.

In the new movie, a kid named Dean is in a diner, walks back into the kitchen, and meets Freddy.  He doesn't die.  He wakes up, and talks to his worried friends for five minutes.  Then, in plain view, he falls asleep again, meets Freddy and dies.   Again, in plain view. 

This is underwhelming and, more so, does not hint at the power and symbolism of our dream life.  It's so very literal and unimaginative, and this is, frankly, unforgivable in a film that should have had great fun playing with the concept of dreams.

Here's my final assessment of the film: "Well, the producers got fat and Freddy got famous, but somebody forgot to make this movie more than a cliff-notes version of a classic, and Krueger wasn't scary anymore, just like that."

A Nightmare on Elm Street, 2010 edition, isn't fun, isn't scary, and it doesn't mean a darn thing except a quick buck on opening weekend.  In 2015, it is deservedly forgotten, and Freddy -- the real Freddy -- is on hiatus.

I have no doubt that he will return to haunt our cinematic dreams again one day.  Hopefully, when that eventuality occurs, the filmmakers will have thought long and hard about this Boogeyman, and how he can function meaningfully in our 21st century world.

Movie Trailer: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Movie Trailer: Dawn of the Dead (2004)

Cult-Movie Review: Poltergeist (2015)

Well, another beloved horror film has been strip-mined in pursuit of the all-mighty dollar. 

The new edition of Poltergeist (2015) is a sad, uninspired shadow of its cherished source material, a work of art lacking totally the visual lyricism of the Tobe Hooper film. 

Even more importantly, this remake lacks the original’s sense of spirituality and very humanity. 

Instead, the 2015 film is a 90 minute cash grab and little else.

I should preface my remarks, however, with a note.  We live in an age of remakes, and so -- lest I go insane -- I do not rail mindlessly against them. 

On the contrary, I take remakes on a case-by-case basis, so that the good ones -- and there are some -- doesn’t get tossed away with the bad. So I was open to a new Poltergeist, as I have been open to other remakes.

My criteria for the new Poltergeist are as follows:

One: Does the remake speak to issues of today in the way that the 1982 film expressed the Zeitgeist of its age? 

In other words, is the spirit and sub-text of the original carried forward into the remake?

Importantly, I don’t expect this new Poltergeist to be about the Reagan Age like the original was. No, I expect it instead, to reflect the Obama Age. Its mission,  therefore, is to show and tell us something about the world we live in now.

Two: does the remake derive creative inspiration from the original and find something new to say about the central ideas and characters, (a haunted house, and a suburban family)?  

I was seeking here, perhaps, to see a half-enunciated idea from the 1982 film developed and expanded upon, revealing to us another or fresh angle of the narrative and its individuals.

Finally -- and perhaps most fundamentally -- is the remake at least as scary a film as the original? 

In a way, this last bench-mark -- fear -- is related to the other two.  If this Poltergeist doesn’t speak trenchantly to 2015, it can’t really be scary.  If it doesn’t give us new shades of the familiar story, it won’t be scary either.

Sadly, the new Poltergeist fails all three tests rather egregiously. 

The down-on-its luck Bowen family, teetering on the edge of financial disaster, purchases a foreclosure in a near-abandoned neighborhood. 

Eric (Sam Rockwell) is out of a job, and Amy (Rosemary De Witt) is a stay-at-home writer who spends more time looking after the children than actually writing.

They are parents to Kendra (Saxon Sharbino), a sassy teen, perpetually-scared Griffin (Kyle Catlett) and gifted, open Maddy (Kennedi Clemons)

Before long, Maddy has detected the presence of spirits in the house. These spirits -- who communicate through the television -- quickly develop a profound interest in her. 

One night, when Eric and Amy are away at a dinner party, the spirits punch their way into our world, attacking Griffin and Kendra, and stealing Maddy away to the spectral plane.

With the help of a parapsychologist, Dr. Powell (Jane Adams), and later a reality-TV show medium, Carrigan Burke (Jared Harris), the Bowens seek to retrieve their daughter from The Other Side.

As I "read" and understand the original Poltergeist, it establishes two key thematic ideas and develops and explores them thoroughly.  

The first is that television is a negative influence on children, and a portal of evil.  It is located in the house (often at the hearth), and therefore brings evil right into the heart of the family.

The second conceit involves the larger national economy. A family called “the Freelings” learn that there is no such thing as a free lunch.  If things seem to be too good to be true, they probably are.

Because of the corruption and lack of oversight in the economy of the 1980s, Mr. Freeling’s avaricious boss is free to commit a horribly immoral (but profitable!) act: moving the headstones at a local cemetery, without moving the bodies underneath them.  

This idea of irresponsible laissez-faire economics creating blow-back is punctuated in the film by a composition in which Steve Freeling is seen reading a copy of a Ronald Reagan Biography: Reagan: The Man, The President.

This remake actually begins quite promisingly, with tips of the hat towards both themes, only with a 2015 twist.

For example, the film opens with a close-up of the pixels on an I-Pad.  

As the camera pulls-back, the pixels form into the imagery of a horror video game and a zombie.  In short order, we also see that the new American family -- the Bowens --  has moved into a house near electrical towers.  

The family also learns that the former owner was a “techno-phile” and that he wired the entire house for universal wi-fi access.  I-Pads, I-Phones and flat screen TVs now take the place of the original’s portal of evil. 

The idea here could be that with the development of wi-fi and personal devices, the evil of the TV is now spread to every corner of the house, not just the living room, or the upstairs TV. 

Now evil can access you and your children anywhere and at anytime.  

On the second front, the new Poltergeist positions the Bowen family as struggling in an economic sense.  

The family moves into a foreclosure in the years after the 2008 Recession. Mom and Dad both are unemployed, and money is tight.  When we are doing poorly in terms of money, we sometimes cut corners, we sometimes make bad choices...and then have to live with those choices. We put off health care expenses. We accumulate credit card debt.  We delay a visit from the plumber, or an electrician.

Again there's ample material here to build a sub-textual case about the economy, and attempt to tie it in with the spectral outbreak.

Indeed, the first twenty minutes or so of Poltergeist are impressive -- the film's best -- because one can detect the filmmakers laying the thematic ground-work for some case about our world today, and how our technology and a weak economy are creating “evil spirits” to menace us. 

There’s a scene here, for instance, in which Mr. Bowen goes to the mall and comes back with an arm-ful of new (expensive) gadgets for the family, living the lie that the family can afford it, and “deserves” a treat.  

But after this scene (which follows one in which Eric learns, embarrassingly, that two family credit cards are over the limit…), absolutely nothing comes of the economy sub-text, or -- crushingly -- the technological one either.

The ideas are dropped without a look back, so that the movie can slavishly recycle the details of the original film instead of charting new territory. 

A malevolent tree grabs the boy on a stormy night. The little girl gets sucked into the closet.  Paranormal investigators come in and quantify the spirits as poltergeists; ones angry about the head-stone incident. Then an eccentric medium is called in to clean the house. The girl is rescued after an instance of bi-location, and then the spirits strike one more time.

It sounds familiar, but there is no sub-text here, no Zeitgeist moments that make us relate to or understand the characters better. There is no philosophical meaning to any of this action. Automatically, then, this remake is a lesser film than the original.  It doesn't operate successfully on multiple layers of meaning.

Let’s move on to the second criteria I enumerated above.  Does anything new happen to develop the ideas of the original?  

Well, we get the recycled family, the recycled house, the recycled medium (now a man), and the recycled paranormal investigators.  Nothing to new to see there.

So what does this movie add the mythos or franchise?

A toy drone that is flown into the other world, so that you can see “the Other Side” in 3-D with your own eyes.  

The original movie didn’t follow Mrs. Freeling’s journey to the spectral realm, but the remake does. The Other Side here doesn’t resemble an astral plane at all, oddly, but rather an organic one, where rotting corpses are piled upon each other, stretching out and trying to grab any one they can get.

The film’s one legitimate inspiration is that the Robbie/Griffin character has been given increased importance and depth. In many ways, this film is really his story.  We learn early on that his mother lost him in a mall three years ago, and so now he is afraid of literally, everything. The film is his journey towards courage, towards being “the super boy” his Mom wants him to be. 

Kyle Catlett gives the best performance in the film, too. Whatever good qualities this Poltergeist possesses owe mostly to his efforts.

Lastly -- and it must be said -- this version of Poltergeist just ain’t scary.

I suspect this sad result has much do with the slap-dash direction and pacing. By contrast, Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist builds and builds, accelerating constantly. The last act is something akin to kinetic madness, but importantly, the original film starts out  small, with only omens of disorder, with things being…off.  The storm clouds must gather before it can rain.

In the original, the ghost attacks don’t start immediately There’s a period of time during which the Freelings learn of the spirits, and exhibit curiosity about them.  The mayhem only begins later. 

But here, there is absolutely no build-up, no character-development at all. Instead, the movie just picks from “They’re Here” to the tree attack.  And then the clown attack is moved from the finale to the middle of the film, a grave miscalculation that short-circuits suspense and tension.

Another comparison: the original Poltergeist is 114 minutes long. The new one is 93 minutes in duration. That’s an important distinction and one that bears mentioning. Twenty long minutes of plot/theme/character development are just...lopped off.  

So make no mistake: this is the slap-jack, cliff-notes version of the story, one with no time or patience for mood, nuance, under-score or character-building. All the stuff that makes the original Poltergeist something special -- like the funeral for Carol Ann’s bird, or Dr. Lesh’s explanation of death -- is omitted here. Presumably so the theater can pack in an extra showing a day.

As a consequence of this choice to simplify the story, the Bowen family feels a lot more generic and less real than did the Freelings.  And since we don’t care or sympathize with this family to the same high degree, the new film actually takes half-a-dozen toy clowns to achieve not even fifty-percent of the scares accomplished by one toy clown in the original.

Seriously, it takes a whole clown collection to make a jump scare here work, as opposed to the original film’s build-up to that under-the-bed terror.  

In fact, the presence of the clowns make no sense here.  A whole car's worth of clowns is discovered in a crawl-space outside Griffin's room.  Eric quips that people "collect" weird things, and that's the only explanation we get.

That's true, Eric.  

But if you go to the trouble to collect weird things -- like all these old fashioned clowns (some made of very expensive porcelain, apparently) -- you likely aren't going to leave them behind when you move.  

Especially if you have money problems. You'll either take them with you, or sell them on E-Bay in a bid for quick cash. The Great Recession Economy is also the E-Bay Economy.  Sometimes E-Bay or Craigslist money are all that gets people through the gaps between pay checks these days.

But this remake HAS to have clowns in it, right?  At the very least so you can plaster one on the poster...

Listen, I can understand remaking Poltergeist.  I can.  

The two ideas of the original film, as I’ve laid out here, involve the integration of technology into our home, and the way that families respond to shifts in economic policies. Those are ideas with huge relevance and importance today, in 2015.

But this Poltergeist is lobotomized, and doesn't know how to turn those ideas into meaningful themes.  And it it doesn't even know what it's about, how can the director make form reflect content?

Oddly, the remake doesn’t even seem to have the resources behind it that the original did.  Here, for example, the house doesn’t fold up on itself in the finale.  

And here, only one corpse bursts up out of the yard, instead of the virtual mob we get in the original, in the pool, in the house and in the yard.  

Here, we don’t get the visual manifestations of the ghosts/demons, either, or the wall-climbing scene.   
Spectacle-wise -- the one area you expect a horror film made in 2015 to improve on the 1982 original -- this film is a total downgrade. It's cut rate not just in terms of ideas, but in terms of special effects too.

The denouement of this Poltergeist is also a debacle.  Remember how the Freelings went to a motel and kicked their TV to the curb, pushing out the portal of evil?  

Here, the Bowens do the same thing…but with a new house.

And it makes no sense.  You can live without a TV in your house.  But if you won’t buy a new house, where the hell are you going to live? 

Out of your car? Gimme a break.

On top of all these deficits, the new Poltergeist looks just like Insidious, The Conjuring or a dozen other modern horror movies. There’s no appeal or value to the film's visual canvass, and no sense of the camera as an active player in the drama. There’s just no classicism, no lyricism, and no poetry in this film’s color schemes or compositions. It could have been made for TV, for all its use of film grammar.

One example: remember how the original Poltergeist connected visually the static blue of the TV screen with the blue “strobe” of the Other World, thereby drawing a visual connection to theme of “portals of evil?”  

Again, I don’t hate remakes as a rule. 

I don't.

But boy do I hate this one. This new Poltergeist doesn't know what scares you, and worse, doesn't know how to scare you.

Movie Trailer: Poltergeist (2015)

Cult Movie Review: King Kong (1976)

Over a decade ago, I had a strange professional experience. The editor on a book I wrote about a classic British science-fiction TV series marked out in red ink every single reference I made in my text to the 1976 version of King Kong. 

As explanation, the editor opined that such a “bomb” could not be discussed as part of legitimate King Kong history.  If I needed to refer to King Kong, then the 1933 film would do just fine.

This anecdote reveals two things.

First, it exposes how editors can impress their own viewpoints and biases on a manuscript. 

Secondly -- and more relevantly for this review --  this story suggests the depth of hatred the Dino De Laurentiis King Kong remake has aroused over the long decades since it premiered.  The film is apparently not only “a bomb,” but it should actually be erased from the history books and our collective cultural memory.  You…can’t…even…write…about…it.

As you may have guessed, I disagree with the questionable conventional wisdom that King Kong (1976) is a bomb, and one unworthy of debate, examination, and analysis.

In the first case, the film grossed over eighty million dollars worldwide on a budget of twenty-four million dollars, with a marketing budget of fifteen million.  King Kong thus cleared its budget and turned a nifty profit, especially in 1970s terms.  In fact, the remake had approximately the same opening weekend gross as Jaws (1975), about seven million dollars. 

So financially speaking, King Kong was definitively not a bomb. The industry expectation recounted in various articles of the day (including in Time Magazine) established that the film should gross between fifty and one hundred million dollars.  Receipts landed just about in the middle of that ballpark, with eighty million.

And in terms of critical response, was King Kong really a bomb?

Critic Pauline Kael certainly didn’t think so.  She wrote in The New Yorker that the new King Kong was a “romantic adventure fantasy – colossal, silly, touching” and even termed it an “absurdist love story.”

Meanwhile, Time Magazine called the film a “confidently conceived, exuberantly executed work of popular movie art.”  

Roger Ebert also praised the film (and gave it “thumbs up” rating) during a 1976 episode of Sneak 

Previews.  Also, the periodical America noted that “in making a comment on the tragedy of the human spirit in an industrialist age, it [the film] speaks directly to and about its audience.”

So while the film undeniably received many negative reviews, it might be more accurate to state that 1976 Kong was controversial, or faced mixed critical reactions.  Those who declared that King Kong was a “bomb” were primarily die-hard fans of the original 1933 film, and members of the protean genre press (the same class that also, incidentally, savaged Space:1999 [1975 – 1977]).

Considering this dynamic and the timing of the film's release, King Kong may actually represent the occasion of the very first “remake” fan war.  As is the case with all remakes, I can see both sides of the debate, but elect to take each remake on a case-by-case basis. Some remakes are worthy and interesting and others...are not.

In the case of King Kong, there are indeed some fascinating aspects of the film to remember and praise.  It’s true that the special effects in the latter half of this Oscar-winning film are an absolute mess, especially in the film’s bungled finale atop the World Trade Center.  And one can only cringe at the craven attempts to sell the man-in-the-monkey suit (Rick Baker) scenes as featuring a giant Kong robot.  Yikes...

Yet -- warts and all -- this King Kong speaks to the 1970s as trenchantly as the original Kong spoke to audiences of the 1930s.   The film contextualizes Kong as an exploited natural resource, as a metaphor for the 1970s Energy Crisis and America’s dependency on petroleum.  And secondly, on a far more personal level, the film comments on the pursuit of fame and its consequences in our modern culture.

I grew up with the 1970s King Kong and thus possess great nostalgic affection for the film.  I’ll be covering 1976 “Kong Mania” here tomorrow afternoon, in my weekly Memory Bank piece, for example.  But childhood affection for it or not, I maintain King Kong is not the “bomb” -- either financially or creatively -- that conventional wisdom has so often suggested.

“Ah, the power of it. Ah, the superpower! Hail to the power! Hail to the power of Kong! And Petrox!” 

In Surabaya, primate researcher Jack Prescott (Jeff Bridge) sneaks aboard the Petrox Explorer as it prepares to set sail for a mysterious destination.  As Fred Wilson (Charles Grodin), executive for Petrox Oil explains, he has discovered in the Pacific what he believes is an uninhabited island hidden behind a perpetual fogbank.  Satellite footage suggests the island could be a rich source of oil.

En route to this remote destination, the Petrox Explorer rescues the lone survivor of a yacht explosion, the gorgeous would-be movie star, Dwan (Jessica Lange).  And upon reaching the island, Jack, Fred and Dwan learn that it is indeed inhabited.  The natives who dwell there cower behind a huge wall in fear of a God called Kong,” in actuality a colossal gorilla.

By night, Dwan is abducted by the natives and transformed into a “bride” or human sacrifice for Kong.  But as Dwan soon learns, the giant gorilla is not a dangerous enemy, but a valiant and loyal protector.  The men from the Petrox Explorer set out to rescue Dwan from Kong even as Fred learns that there is no gusher on the island…no oil.  So as to spare his professional reputation and save his job, Wilson decides to capture Kong and bring him back to civilization as a “commercial” for Petrox.

After Kong is captured and brought to New York City, the regal ape breaks free and causes chaos in Manhattan.  Finding Dwan again, Kong carries her to the top of the Twin Towers.  Before long, helicopters armed with machine guns close in for the kill…

“Well, here's to the big one…” 

Leaving behind the context of the 1930s and the Great Depression, King Kong (1976) is truly a remake with a modern spin. The film revolves around the Energy Crisis of the 1970s, particularly the 1973 Oil Crisis. 

As you may recall, that incident occurred when OPEC slashed oil production by five percent and then increased prices dramatically, something on the order of seventy percent.  The Arab organization used this so-called “oil weapon” to protest the U.S. government’s support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War.  

At home, American consumers were soon urged not to be “fuelish” about consumption, and to conserve gasoline.  The embargo was lifted, finally, when the Nixon Administration negotiated an Israeli withdrawal from Sinai.

But the OPEC incident revealed to many Americans the heretofore un-excavated nexus between government action, international relationships, oil companies, and fossil fuel.  If America was to become truly energy independent -- and avoid a repeat Energy Crisis in the process -- it would need to discover and dig up new sources of petroleum.

King Kong (1976) is explicitly about this quest, and the mighty Kong himself stands in -- literally, in one case -- for petroleum; for a precious and exploitable natural resource. 

In the specific scene I mention, Kong is rolled out before an American audience in Manhattan…ensconced inside a giant Petrox gas tank.  It would be foolish to deny the potent symbolism of this imagery. An audience stands in awe of a giant container of gasoline, the very life-line to its twentieth century life-style of leisure and consumption.

But underneath that tank is...what, precisely?

A monster that -- if set free – could threaten or destroy everything in our modern world, here symbolized by the Big Apple. 

If one stops to consider that the ownership and control of foreign oil has been the precipitating cause of global conflicts on several occasions, one may begin to detect the underlying context of this Kong remake.  The race to possess and control oil could lead not to a world of plenty, but to destruction and chaos.  We try to control oil (or Kong), but look what happens?

Furthering the symbolism, Kong is brought to America inside the vast cargo hold of an oil super tanker, a fact which also visually equates the ape with petroleum, a valuable resource taken from a foreign locale and made to serve American interests.

In the original film, Kong was “the eighth wonder of the world,” an amazing spectacle captured to relieve the boredom and anxiety of a people enmeshed in an economic depression.  

In the 1976 remake, Kong is literally a mascot, a “commercial” (in the words of the script) for an oil company hoping to beat its corporate competition to larger profits.  In fact, a literal comparison is made between Kong and the famous Exxon campaign “put a tiger in your tank.” Only here the royal and regal natural power is embodied by a primate rather than a feline.

In toto, the “Kong as natural resource” angle of the remake works surprisingly well.  Wilson is described aptly in the film as an “environmental rapist” and Prescott worries about what will happen to the island culture once it is bereft of the “energy” (in this case creative and spiritual energy…) that Kong’s presence provides it. Kong is “the juice,” in other words, that powers every aspect of their lives, from organized religion to national security.  When Kong taken from them….does their culture die? What does it run on?

As Richard Eder wrote in The New York Times “the impulse to explore, to discover, to bring back something that you’ve discovered - [that which we found in the first King Kong] is now replaced by simple greed – the greed of the oil company representative Fred Wilson, to find a gusher.”

In the same vein, the film is veritably loaded with references to Gulf, Shell and Exxon.  And Skull Island itself is termed in dialogue a “huge tank just waiting for us to twist the top off.”  

The idea expressed, then, is that of out-of-control oil companies hoping to sustain our 20^th century life style.  In support of this endeavor, they can travel anywhere in the world, claim natural resources as their own property, and in the process destroy the natural beauty and even the people of those terrains.  The excuse?  “There’s a national energy crisis!,” as Wilson says. 

In charting this dynamic, the remake of King Kong evokes a far more cynical and troubled world than the one dramatized in the original 1930s film.  If the original film is a fairy tale of mythic proportions, the remake is, by contrast, a cautionary tale about a world running out of gas, creatively, spiritually and in terms of natural resources.  It’s a world that hopes to latch onto anything “new,” and exploit it for its monetary value even if that “new” thing is destroyed in the process. Going even further, the decision for Kong to climb the World Trade Center -- a representation of western economic and global powers -- is symbolic in some sense too.  As Time Magazine opined, the film might be seen as a "projection of Western fears of what might happen if the Third World should develop its potential power and fight back."

Menaced, literally, by Big Oil.

Kong comes to America...in an oil tanker.

In the remade Kong, Dwan also fits into the leitmotif about exploitation. She is an aspiring actress who desires, more than anything, to be famous.  Her experience on Skull Island with Kong is Dwan’s ticket to fame, and she realizes it.  Dwan is, in essence, seduced by the possibility of being a “star” and so betrays Kong…the beast who protected her and sheltered her in a dangerous jungle.  By contrast, Prescott possesses the wherewithal to detect Wilson’s exploitation of Kong, and he terms the whole affair a “grotesque farce.” 

But Dwan can’t see or acknowledge the truth fully because she is obsessed with herself, and with fame. 

This idea is woven nimbly into the screenplay by Lorenzo Semple, Jr.  Early on, we learn that the character changed her name from Dawn to Dwan in order to make it “more memorable,” a sign of the character’s true aspiration to be a celebrity. 

And when Kong is captured, and feeling morose about his captivity, Dwan tells the great beast not to worry, that he’s “going to America to be a star.”  This line also suggests that for Dwan, fame is the highest achievement in our culture. 

Finally, Dwan can’t risk rebelling against Fred’s wishes for her, or else, as Wilson says, “I promise you'll never get another booking in your life. You'll end up tap-dancing at Rotary clubs.” This threat of public obscurity keeps Dwan in place as a team member in the “grotesque farce.”  Dwan rarely asks if Kong’s imprisonment and loss of freedom – his exploitation – is an acceptable price for her media super stardom. 

One of the primary reasons I appreciate the artistry of the 1970s King Kong involves the clever blocking and staging of the final scene at the foot of the twin towers.   

Kong is dead and Dwan stands before the cameras at his side, playing up her sadness and tears for maximum press impact.  Prescott attempts to approach Dwan through the crowd of photographers, to rescue her from the paparazzi (just as Kong did earlier, at his unveiling in Manhattan). But then Jack stops short.  A dark expression crosses his face as he recognizes that Dwan is exactly where she wants to be: at the center of attention. 

The blocking and reaction shot (from Bridges) represent a visual way of establishing a philosophical line of dialogue from the original film, but one not included in the remake.

It was not the planes (or helicopters in this case) that killed Kong.  It was Beauty who killed the Beast.

As the scene continues, the photographers grow so aggressive that even the attention-hungry Dwan looks legitimately disturbed and menaced by their actions.  But both of her dedicated protectors – Kong and Prescott – are now gone.  As flash bulbs explode all around her, Dwan looks dismayed, but the implication is clear.  This is the bed she made for herself, and now she must lie in it. 

Importantly, Prescott has witnessed another man -- Kong -- destroyed attempting to “protect” Dwan from that which she actively seeks – attention -- and so he, finally, makes a different decision.  He leaves Dwan to the tender mercies of the press.  Thus we leave King Kong on a deliberately down-beat note. There is no happy ending to be found.

For Dwan, it’s be careful what you wish for…you just might get it.  For Jack, it's his realization that everything for Dawn – even the death of Kong – is a thing to be used to further fame and fortune.

Dwan is ready for her close-up?

Jack realizes that she  will always be a fame-seeker

The press is her boyfriend now...and she knows it.

In the years since King Kong premiered, we have, as a nation, descended much deeper into this kind of craven celebrity culture, where truly unworthy people become famous for fifteen minutes for participation in a tragedy, a trauma or a scandal.  King Kong is an early commentary on this facet of modern life, granting Dwan her fifteen minutes of fame at the expense, literally, of a king among animals.  Kong had no concern but to protect Dwan, and was (innocently) unaware that she could not reciprocate emotionally.  In essence, Kong is exploited twice in the film: first by Wilson (as a natural resource) and secondly by Dwan (as a gateway to fame and celebrity).   This depth in terms of narrative strikes me as being more than enough meat for a "monster" movie.

In terms of forging a hypnotic spell, King Kong is quite an intoxicating picture, at least in its first hour or so.  Real locations (in Hawaii, I believe) provide awe-inspiring natural vistas.  There are some shots featured here that are so gorgeous, so unimaginable on a visual scale, that they literally prove jaw-dropping.  One lengthy “zoom out” from a tight shot in a natural canyon suggests a scale far beyond our capability to fully process.  Such visuals seem that much more amazing for having been lensed in the age before digital effects and CGI.  It’s absolutely appropriate that the film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography.

About mid-way through King Kong, the film transitions from real life locations to studio sets that, alas reek of sound-stage fakery. Yet the transition -- while jarring -- may work thematically. In other words, the island seems to turn “uglier” and more claustrophobic as Fred Wilson’s motives for it (and its inhabitants) also turn ugly  As man grows dominant (and Kong comes nearer to man's world), the visuals take a turn for the desolate and despairing.

At first, the island is a place of unfettered beauty and innocence – God’s hand on Earth.  But then, technological, 20^th century man shows up to put a stamp on it, and the land itself seems to change, revealing a craggy, hard-edged, ugly and ominous side.  By the time we’ve gotten to Kong’s smoky, desolate lair, Skull Island looks as though it could be a harsh, crater-filled landscape on the moon, or perhaps Mars.  And then, of course, the movie takes us to a REAL jungle...New York City.

From this...

...to this...

...to this...

...to this...

..at last, to this.

King Kong’s final scenes, atop the Twin Towers, are also pretty terrible in terms of visuals.  In part this is so because of blue screen and rear projection work that fails to maintain, in proper ratio, the size of Kong and the size of the attacking helicopters.  It’s also a matter of the lighting of the various component parts of the scene.  The night-shots of the helicopters and night sky look washed out and dim compared to the footage of Kong.

And yet, in the final analysis, I can forgive the special effects lapses of King Kong because I feel the film attempts to imbue the “monster movie” form with a new sense of social relevance. King Kong’s game is to ask questions about how, in modern times, we steal from nature and often destroy nature for our own selfish purposes.  The Dwan and Wilson characters represent two sides of that particular coin.  They are indeed selfish and foolish (or is it "fuelish?").

It ought to be noted, as well, that the 1970s King Kong is the first version of the material to suggest more than a rudimentary monster/victim dynamic between Kong and his would-be bride.  This is an important element also featured in the Jackson remake of 2005.  Here, in one of the film’s best and most poetic scenes, Kong takes Dwan -- now covered in mud -- to bathe under a natural waterfall.  

The moment is magical (and erotic, strangely...) not merely because of Jessica Lange’s extreme and ravishing physical beauty, but because of Kong’s gentleness and yes, even sweetness.  I don’t know that either of those qualities could be ascribed to the 1933 version of this “monster” character.  This Kong seems a lot more humane and less violent than his predecessor.  The waterfall scene is supported brilliantly, I should add, by the late John Barry's lush and romantic score, which -- accompanying the visuals -- practically causes swooning.  In lyrical, visually ravishing moments such as this, it's awful hard to totally hate this production of Kong.

Yet if the end game is to hate all over King Kong (1976), there’s obviously plenty to latch onto too.  No stop-motion effects, weak optical-effects in the last half, and a script that probably features too many in-jokes about “male chauvinist pig apes,” “the Empire State Building” and the like.  And yet, for all its obvious failings, it must also be said that this (sentimental) Kong wears its heart on its sleeve.

Or as Pauline Kael astutely noted, “I don’t think I’ve ever before seen a movie that was a comic-strip great romance in the way this one is… it’s a joke that can make you cry.”