The Power of Trees Compels You

When the director of The Exorcist makes a universally panned dud about a killer tree that’s only on Instant Watch for another day, you might as well cancel all my appointments. It was time to watch William Friedken’s The Guardian.

Quick Plot: A brief title card informs us that during Druidic times, people worshiped trees.

That’s that.

Cut to the present day, where a pair of parents are on their way out for the weekend. This is clearly quite convenient for the mysterious nanny who uses the break as the perfect chance to take her newborn charge into the woods and sacrifice him to a giant Sleepy Hollow-esque tree.

I’ll say it once: prospective nannies’ references should be checked more thoroughly than pretty much anything you’ve ever thought to check in your life, be that taxes, your bakery line number, or whether or not you remembered to put on deodorant before leaving the house.

Fast forward to a new happy couple played by Law & Order’s Carey Lowell and one of the minor characters in two of my favorite sports movies (Field of Dreams and The Cutting Edge, and yes, figure skating is a sport or would you like to try it yourself?), Dwier Brown. Phil and Kate, as they are called, are forced to hire a live-in babysitter when they decide to rent a modern house out of their means, since Kate has to return to work in order to help pay the rent. After a token montage necessary for any movie with job interviews, the couple decide on a young gym teacher in the making.

Except then she ends up dead.

Choice number 2, luckily, is a sexier Mary Poppins named Camilla. Before you can sing Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, Camilla is showing up in Phil’s sexy dreams and lecturing Kate about how breastfeeding will keep her baby pure. What she doesn’t say, at least not out loud, is that Baby Jake needs to save his purity so that he makes a better human sacrifice to Camilla’s tree boyfriend.

As much as the idea of a killer tree may SEEM the culprit for The Guardian’s sour reputation, it’s really more the lack of suspense that damns it into unfortunate territory. We know from the very first lullabye that Camilla wants to feed Jake to the woods, which wouldn’t be terrible if we didn’t ALSO know that we were in the hands of one of cinema’s all-time greats.

Truthfully, The Guardian isn’t nearly as laughable as one might expect when watching a cross between The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (before that was a thing) and Little Otik. The opening baby sacrifice is actually quite disturbing, and the whole cast is solid enough to sell most of the material with a straight face. We get coyotes eating nerds, trees decapitating middle-aged punks, and branches wrapping themselves around their victims like an anaconda on Owen Wilson. So in terms of ridiculous killing styles, The Guardian is kind of awesome.

It’s just also…kinda…eh…hmm. Muddled could be a good word. The shaky marriage between domestic Fatal Attraction-like thriller with the whole, you know, woman worshiping a killer tree just never meshes in a way that feels, dare I say it, organic. It’s obvious that there were script and production woes (I doubt we’ll get a proud Friedken commentary should The Guardian ever make it to Blu Ray) and while the pedigree behind the film makes it superior to a lot of rival horror films, it’s still an uncomfortable combination of too many hard to handle elements.

High Points 

Jenny Seagrove makes for a surprisingly believable sexy tree hugging nanny, something I assume is hard to because thus far, even Meryl Streep hasn't attempted that feat (and yes, that's a challenge) 

Maybe it's just a sign of the times, but I enjoyed the 'switch' of having the husband be the one accused of paranoid hysteria. From the 90s to now, most of these kinds of films always want to use the crutch of maternal instinct and the fact that it's more believable for the world to NOT believe a raging mother. Considering how easy it would have been to have Carey Lowell's character blend jealousy with fear, it's a refreshing gender swap.

Low Points

On one hand, the big thug massacre is big and gory and kind of kickass. On the other, I'm probably just saying that because it involved laughable 45 year old schoolyard bullies and death by dummy

Lessons Learned

If you don’t want anyone to know that you sustained a gigantic gash on your tummy, perhaps you should be safe and not wear a flimsy white blouse when the wound is still fresh

No matter how many babies you feed a superevil ancient tree, all it takes is one chainsaw to show it who’s boss

When reporting a series of supernatural events to a dubious police detective, you might want to leave out some of the less important and more unbelievable elements, like how the woman who tried to sacrifice your baby to a tree could also fly 

The Winning Line

“She has an accent...European I think, British maybe.”

Now I could understand someone mistaking a Belgian accent for French or Scottish for Irish, but…well…I guess Britain IS in Europe…

Look! It’s…

Candyman’s jerky professor Xander Berkely popping up in the film’s last reel to play a detective

Nostalgic ‘90s Alert!

“I love you, Roseanne Barr,” jokes Phil to his (not really) chubbily pregnant wife. Savvy Roseanne fans can easily date The Guardian by the fact that she still had a last name.

Rent/Bury/Buy

The Guardian is certainly an interesting watch, both for Friedken fans who can’t shake the curiosity of watching him tackle killer trees and horror nerds who, you know, just love when ANYONE tackles killer trees. It’s not a hidden gem or so-bad-it’s-wonderful campfest, but for a 1990 horror film with a bad reputation, it’s not boring to watch. Plus, you know...killer trees.

Forest of (Boredom to) Death

We’ve all seen M. Night Shamalaongadong’s The Happening. We’ve all learned the wonders of SCIENCE! and the horror of DYING BEES! and non-importance of sharing TEERAMEESUE! and, perhaps most importantly, the absolute wonders of something called a HOT DOG. If The Happening has done anything of note in the 21st century, that something is make it far easier for any other film to feature evil flora and come off with at least one compliment:

It’s better than The Happening.

Marky Mark almost always agrees with that statement

Quick Plot: An unusual forest is becoming home to a gaggle of suicides and a vicious rape-murder. When an investigating detective dies of a heart attack under the trees, a flighty reporter named May launches an exploitive news series on the forest’s mystical hauntings, trying her darnest to rein in some help from her botanist boyfriend Shu-Hoi, an obsessive man who’d rather carry out experiments in his greenhouse. A dead-serious female detective named Ha (stop it, it’s not funny) jumps on the case with some help from Shu-Hoi, dragging the sleazy suspected rapist into the woods with a gang of reporters where the trees somehow drag out a hilarious, condom-eating confession.

That’s about the first hour of Forest of Death, though it feels akin to three weeks and half a Monday. This is a slowwwwwww film. And not an overly interesting one, despite the promise of evil forestry, ghosts, rape, and condom snacks. 

The idea of a botanist hero is fun. But Shu-Hoi is not. He’s a handsome enough scientist, but saddle the poor nerd with a shrewish Gale Weathers-lite girlfriend and it’s hard to really like him. As Detective Ha, Shu Qi is easily the most interesting character onscreen, but it’s a shame that the film feels the need to hint at a relationship that’s never actually there between her and Shu-Hoi. It’s like Forest of Death made a bold decision to feature a strong female center, then remembered she was attractive and hence warranted a tepid love triangle. It’s somewhat insulting.

There’s also the matters of storytelling and pacing, something Forest of Death seems to make up as it goes along. Once the main crime is resolved (rather hilariously, might I add), the film just kind of limps along for another half hour. It’s as if you entered a wave pool where the waves were REALLY rough, then it was time to turn it off and you hung out, eventually realizing the waves would never come back on because the person that pushes the wave button is taking a really long lunch. So you leave. And the credits roll. And Emily is left feeling very unhappy.

High Points

I like the idea of these three stories--Ha’s investigation, May’s sensationalist reporting and Shu-Hoi’s plant talking--and how they could interweave. It’s certainly not a bad starting point for a film...

Low Points

...except Forest of Death never does anything interesting at all with them

Lessons Learned

Hong Kong journalists are, on average, 17 years old

Post-coital secret sharing only works when you or your partner enjoy the coitus

Lab plants dig a good funky beat

Rent/Bury/Buy

Meh. I watched Forest of Death because it was expiring on Instant Watch and now that it’s gone, good riddance. This isn’t an awful or incompetent movie, but I personally kind of sorta really did hate it. Slow, plodding, aimless, and somehow unoriginal despite being about lie detecting plants. Hardcore Asian horror enthusiasts might still appreciate some of its aspects, but I’d much rather pop in Little Shop of Horrors and recall my childhood crush on Rick Moranis than sit through this one again. 

Then again, I kind of ALWAYS want to watch Little Shop of Horrors and moon over Rick Moranis’ adorableness, so perhaps that’s an unfair comparison. Here’s a better one: I’d rather watch William Friedken stumble all over a tree lover-themed horror film in The Guardian than rewatch Forest of Death. 

Heck, I’d rather watch William Friedken eat a condom than rewatch this movie. I’d rather--

I’ll stop before I say something illegal. We’ll leave the last word to Oscar nominee Marky Mark:

Flower Power

As modern hippies join hands and hold organic bake sales to benefit Earth Day, we horror fans find our own ways of honoring this third planet from the sun most of us call home. Personally, I can't think of a better method than to comb through cinema history for a few films high on environmentally inspired dangers. I don't know about you, but that sounds far more fun than making a compost pile or, you know, trying to save a world that seems so hellbent on killing us.

Terrifying Trees!

While there has yet to be an official Arbor Day entry into the slasher school of holiday-themed horror, trees do get their due, and I’m not just talking about Elm Street (ba dom bump! I'll stop now). William Friedken's abysmal 1990 The Guardian bests The Hand That Rocks the Cradle for presenting the wealthy suburbs’ most viscous nanny (and adds the whole “druid cult that believes in sacrificing babies to oaks” twist that’s much worse than it sounds). Of course, The Evil Dead gives us an infamous lady-raping tree, but the film that truly alleviates my guilt over wasting paper goes back 70 years to the Yellow Brick Road. Whether Oz exists south of the Equator or somewhere deep inside Dorothy’s uppers/downers-filled head, it does boast a forest that could kick the hobbits out of Middle Earth. If my woods ever insulted me with the fervor of a bad standup comic or hurled apples my way with more speed than Johann Santana, I’d say screw double-sided copies and bring on urban sprawl.

Eat Your Vegetables (Before They Kill You)

When I was 8 years old, I started my first great unfinished screenplay titled, quite simply,  “Don’t Eat.” The poster art (done in pre-sharpener equipped Crayola) featured a giant hot dog menacingly squeezing a ketchup bottle’s contents into a dying diner’s mouth as flames spouted out his eyes. I’m still waiting for Harvey Weinstein’s call, but in the meantime, any film about killer food will keep me entertained. Because it’s ridiculous. Obviously, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes is worth its infamy, but for a poetically veggie viewing, I’d hit up Children of the Corn 2: The Final (despite 5 more and counting sequels) Sacrifice. The 1992 installment tosses in an explanation of how chemically rotting corn mold was responsible for driving Isaac & Co. into Bad Seed levels of bloodthirstiness. And here I thought those cobs just had too many carbs.

Villainous Vinery

Invasion of the Body Snatchers has its spores and Creepshow has a fuzzy green Stephen King, but it seems like most ferocious fauna is a tad too alien-based for a day that celebrates this planet. Perhaps one of the most underrated horror films of recent years is The Ruins, a glossy but nasty little chiller that features frisky plant life as creatively sadistic as it is au naturale. Based on Scott B. Smith’s fantastically frightening novel of the same name, The Ruins makes a poison ivy rash look pleasant. Hell, it makes jumping naked into an overgrown garden of three-leaved bushes look more comforting than falling gently into a basket of fluffy towels regularly leapt into by Snuggles, the fabric softener bear.

Emoting in the Wind (which is totally not Happening)

If the world is indeed populated by nerdy, whiny voiced Mark Walberg’s who constantly worry about What’s Happening to The Bees!, then I’m all for deadly wind swooping in to destroy the human population in grisly and thoroughly painful ways. While I admire M. Night Shayamalan’s um, intent to highlight environmental issues, I--along, I’m sure, with most of the non-comatose public who lost 89 minutes to this bewildering bad mess--found his latest disaster to be worthy of extinction. Still, the idea of Mother Nature taking matters into her own hands ain’t bad. 

Now let’s never speak of this movie again.

Deadly Dionaea Muscipula

Let us stop to consider the irony of the venus fly trap. It’s a plant. It’s also a carnivore. In a way, that makes perfect sense (you can never accuse it of cannibalism) but holy shit. A plant eats meat. It’s nearly as confusing as goblins turning humans into greenery for cuisine while promoting vigilant vegetarianism (it's hard to go more than a week without mentioning Troll 2 in some form or another). 

Naturally, venus fly traps make ideal villains. Little Shop of Horrors amps it up by fitting its name to cast its a man-eating flower as a creature FROM outer space, but for a more earth-bound example, look to the animated framing story of Creepshow 2. It even teaches a few lessons about the wrongness of bullying and the importance of teaching youths about gardening. 

So dear readers, how did YOU celebrate your homeland this past week? Non-dairy pizza parties decorated with crepe-shaped hemp paper or learning a lesson about organic recycling with Cliff Clavin in Motel Hell?