Just a Friend You Haven't Met

 

If you had asked me two days ago what my life was missing, I might have said something silly like "world peace."

Now that I've watched Never Talk to Strangers, it's clear that the answer was in front of me all along (or at least since 1995):

a slow motion montage of sex and trust falls

Quick Plot: Dr. Sarah Taylor is a criminal psychologist currently in the middle of evaluating an accused rapist murderer Max Cheski (the always welcome Harry Dean Stanton). Following the disappearance of her fiance one year earlier, Sarah's personal life mostly involves gently fighting off neighbor Dennis Miller, until one fateful evening when she meet-cutes Tony Ramirez in the wine aisle.

This is a man who knows his cabernet and looks and sounds like Antonio Banderas. How can she resist?

Sarah and Tony begin a steamy relationship that quickly fizzles out when she reacts weirdly to him shooting a moving clown target at a carnival. It only takes one reminder of Tony's luscious body hair to send her straight back to his industrial loft, because it's the 1990s and every sexy mysterious man lives in an industrial loft. 

While her personal life is on the ups, her work days are a bit scratchy. Sarah's estranged father shows up in his Willy Loman drag to restart their rocky relationship. Cheski makes a few veiled threats. Then she gets a few presents: a bouquet of dead flowers, her own published obituary, and her precious orange tabby Sabrina cut up in a gift box.

The police give the super helpful and comforting advice that they can't do anything about this, and that Sarah's best bet is hire a private detective (the more things change...). He reports some unpleasant details about her new beau, but this being a '90s erotic thriller, there's always a whole lot more to the story.

And whoa boy there is! I would never dream of spoiling this oddball slice of Snackwell's era junk food. Director Peter Hall had a long career in theater, and he doesn't quite seem to know how to make Jordan Rush and Lewis A. Green's messy script come together (would anyone?). But then there's Rebecca DeMornay's steely blue eyes running down Antonio Banderas's bare chest, while slow motion flashbacks, and the kind of twist ending that sings like a soap opera aria. 

High Points

The world has never fully appreciated just how sexy a screen presence Antonio Banderas has. Never Talk to Strangers gets it

Low Points

I think it simply has to be a tradition that anytime Dennis Miller plays an ex-boyfriend in a '90s thriller, he comes off as the kind of scummy toxic male who would whine about being in the friend zone and is easily the worst part of his respective film

Lessons Learned

We're all just animals with beepers

There's no such thing as a good domestic pinot noir

Electric heaters are always dangerous, even more so when INSTALLED OVER A BATHTUB 

Rent/Bury/Buy

Never Talk to Strangers is a terrible exploration of mental health, and a damn fun watching experience. You can find it streaming on Tubi in all its sexy saxophone-scored glory. 

...Unless They're Hot Men With Ponytails

Has there been a modern actor who gives more to his roles than Antonio Banderas? The man somehow manages to act to the tippy tip of his ebony ponytail, and nowhere was that more apparent than in the many steamy thrillers he did in the ‘90s.

And also, elaborate European photo shoots

Quick Plot: Dr. Sarah Taylor (fresh off rocking the cradle Rebecca De Mornay) is a criminal psychologist trying to figure out if rapist/murderer Harry Dean Stanton is actually crazy or faking insanity for his upcoming trial. Being a career woman, her home life is naturally lonely and sad. Sarah’s apartment is home to an affectionate cat (yes, you should be worried) and a few pictures of her ex-boyfriend, who mysteriously vanished without a trace a year earlier. She also has a deadbeat alcoholic dad trying a little too hard to return to her life.

One night, Sarah has a wine-fueled meet-cute with a handsome stranger named Tony played with all the smoldering sexiness that can be contained by Antonio Banderas’s ponytail holder. 

The pair begin what may very well be one of the most complicated relationships I’ve ever seen portrayed in a mainstream film. After a successful date, they go to a carnival where Tony shows off his shooting skills to a nervous Sarah. While we’re not talking Darkman TAKE THE F*CKING ELEPHANT levels of tension, Sarah is rattled and proceeds to call everything off, storming out of Tony’s sparsely furnished industrial loft with attitude, only to turn around and come back in for some aggressive industrial loft cage sex set to the tune of your typical ‘90s saxophone solo.

Things keep getting weird for Sarah. Following a mysterious delivery of dead flowers, she receives a serial killer style note pointing her towards a newspaper obituary of herself. Also, her slaughtered cat shows up in a parcel. 

Now, it’s personal.

Despite the fact that Sarah is working on a high-profile case of an imprisoned murderer, the cops’ reaction to her receiving threats and a dead cat is essentially “here’s the business card of a private investigator that can probably do a better job than we can.” 

Much mystery follows, and it’s a pretty fun ride. What kind of dark secrets are lurking in Tony’s body hair? Could upstairs neighbor Dennis Miller be jealous to the point of kitticide? Has Sarah’s dad returned with other motives than reconciliation? Is Harry Dean Stanton (side note: I am apparently incapable of not writing his name as “Harry Dead Stanton”; sorry Hank) using some outside clout to scare his doctor to his side? Can you ever trust a former cop who drinks chamomile tea?

These questions and many more are answered in a rather glorious manner with Never Talk To Stranger’s gleeful finale, one that I wouldn’t dream of spoiling. The best part about the insane zaniness of it all is that when you think back on the film, the bizarre twist (and I do mean bizarre) in no way comes out of nowhere. Savvy viewers shouldn’t be shocked.

Even though it’s REALLY kind of ridiculous.

There were a lot of steamy dramatic thrillers that came out in the ‘90s, and most of them involved the kind of poster art that gave us serious closeups of its stars staring out at the potential audience, sometimes with unclothed but still PG-13 rated body parts padding out the frame. Never Talk To Strangers is indeed one such film, but unlike many of its peers, it delivers on its promise. Is it a masterpiece? Heavens no. Does it involve Antonio Banderas pouring wine with the same kind of machismo you’d normally find in a Rambo movie? Yes indeed. 

Isn’t life grand?

High Points

DAT ENDING

Perhaps even more notably, this film has a montage that involves Rebecca De Mornay and Antonio Banderas involved in slow-motion trust exercises, playing in the snow, and bedroom sex that finds the oddest use of a satin sheet I've ever seen, and easily an early influence on The Human Centipede

Low Points

I suppose one could find fault with the odd pacing of the film’s first hour, which has a bizarrely hard time finding any kind of basis in keeping Sarah’s career, budding romance, and death threats in a kind of tandem that makes sense

Lessons To How You Know You’re Watching A ‘90s Movie

Dennis Miller plays the ex-love interest and now slightly sleazy platonic friend who ends up in the hospital

One could go to an airport and randomly choose different flights to board two minutes before take-off with only the slightest security check

A garbage disposal in every home was simply the lay of the land

Rent/Bury/Buy

Sadly Never Talk To Strangers seems to be a hard find. It’s a shame because this is the kind of film that’s perfect for one of those “everybody rediscovers it on Netflix and talks about how bonkers it is for a week” renewals. I can’t recommend anyone spends hard-earned cash on this, but if you can track it down at your local library (WHICH SHOULD BE YOUR BEST FRIEND ANYWAY) or video store, it’s more than worth a watch with a vintage bottle of pinot noir as recommended by a sexy Spanish man with a ponytail and ridiculous apartment.

And if you can't track down the film but need some sort of fix, I give you this:

The Shin-n-n-ing

For a good chunk of movie audiences, Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining stands as one of cinema’s greatest accomplishments in terror. To its grandfather, it was (at least at the time of its release) blasphemy.

Thusly did we get Mick Garris’ extremely literal 1997 miniseries, written by King and filmed at the very hotel that inspired the tale. To experience all three tellings is a pretty fascinating exercise in the art--and sometimes, fingerpainted afterschool activity--of the adaptation.

It surprises some (okay, my cats) to learn that I haven’t read that much of Stephen King’s canon. I adore his essay work, but each of the handful of King fiction I’ve picked up continue to kill me with final act buzzkill (Salem's Lot is a pleasant buck of that trend). Lately though, I’m becoming more forgiving in my old age of literary criticism. I blew through Carrie with plenty of energy, so following it up with one of King’s most celebrated hits seemed like the best idea since buying Maximum Overdrive on DVD.

More refreshing than a soda can to the groin!

If you’re a horror fan who has never read The Shining, head to your nearest library/local bookstore/airport and give it a go. Though King himself acknowledges that some of his prose is on the messy side, the book moves like a fascinating nightmare. Wendy, Jack and Danny are all written with a firm ear towards character and their tentative hold on a fragile family unit is as devastating as the latter half is scary. Jack’s descent is inevitable, but as King astutely recognizes in his introduction to the book's reprint, Jack isn’t a one-dimensional monster anxiously awaiting his transformation. We care about these people, making every swing of the roque mallet hurt.

But let’s face it: most readers don’t travel 500 plus pages through The Shining for a family drama about the perils of alcoholism. Inside the ghostly holdings of The Overlook lurks some true terror, from an eerily macabre masked ball to the iconic Room 217. Most memorable is Jack’s, Danny’s and Dick Halloran’s meet-ups with the growling lion made of topiary. It’s truly remarkable how effective scenes of evil garden creations can be on the page...

And how damn silly looking they are when brought to life by 1997 era CGI. Kubrick famously omitted the topiary from his film, claiming special effects wouldn’t do it justice. Perhaps that’s true (considering how giggly the 1980s BBC version of The Day of the Triffids made me, I’d say yes). Or maybe, like so much else in his version, Kubrick didn’t think they worked according to his vision.

Can't imagine why...

An adaptation, you see, is just that. It’s an interpretation of preexisting material, not necessarily a direct translation of it. 


One of my biggest pet peeve comments I hear from movie viewers is the whine that “they changed it from the book!”  Why is this offensive? ‘They’ (evil filmmakers with their own ideas) didn’t change YOUR book. They didn’t rape its author and force it to birth this creation or chain him or her in a tower until the writer released a Galileo-like false confession that erased any original ideas. Books and movies exist on two different plains of the universe.


Sometimes, a close-to-the-page film breeds greatness (No Country For Old Men, Atonement) while others fall flat (The Road, Blindness). What I respect most is a film that honors its source material’s essence but understands well enough that the language of film can veer wherever it wants and still be great (i.e., Children of Men or The Sweet Hereafter, fine literary works that bred incredible filmmaking).

Kubrick falls into the latter category. His Shining plays quite a bit with its source material, retaining its skill but filling it with an entirely different substance. Does it work as a film? Certainly. As an adaptation? Yes. It’s just not the translation loyal readers (and one writer) may have been waiting for. 

Jack Nicholson’s Jack is, much to the annoyance of Stephen King, not the Jack on his pages. He starts with a Joker grin and ends with the same Joker grin frozen solid, and while it’s a terrifying character that has rightfully become iconic, it’s ultimately far less complex than the tortured recovering alcoholic of the novel. It’s probably Kubrick’s biggest deviation, and one that builds an immediate distance between the audience and characters. Sure, Shelley Duvall (say nothing negative; woman has a lifetime get out of jail free card for creating Faerie Tale Theatre) as Wendy comes off as a bit of a nag, but that doesn’t mean we ever really understand Jack wanting to plant an axe into her back.

It’s understandable that the casting would irk King, particularly since the author used the character as something of a metaphor for his own struggles with alcohol. For that reason alone, it's clear why the author would take such a strong position (executive producer and screenwriter) on the second stab at adapting his material. The problem, of course, is that he put it in the hands of someone who loved the novel even more than he did.


I have a lot of respect for Mick Garris. The man clearly adores the genre and would sell his kidneys and children to make horror even better.

But that doesn’t mean he’s a good director.


The Stand is a mediocre retelling of King’s epic, with lots of aspects (the ridiculousness of the sultry pill-popping Laura Sangiacomo as a virgin, the casting of Rob Lowe, and much more) that just don’t work. His Masters of Horror episode, Chocolate, has some interesting ideas with painfully awful execution. And Sleepwalkers...well...there have been worse adaptations of King pieces.

And yet, it makes perfect sense that Stephen King would watch him direct his adored text. I obviously don’t know what their working relationship was like, but I imagine conversations went as such:


MG: So Mr. King, I was thinking of cutting that scene where Halloran misses the plane to Denver. It seems a little unnecessary, don’t you think?

SK: No way. It’s important in showing how hard the dude’s trying. Also, I wrote it.


MG: Totally! Forget I ever said a thing. Um, what about the one that comes about ten minutes later, where Halloran lands and the car rental cashier kindly tells him she’ll call ahead to put chains on the vehicle? It kind of cuts into the action over the Overlook and, well, I don’t know that we need it.


SK: Did you hear me the first time?


MG: Of course! I mean, you’re right, 110% right. I guess that means I shouldn’t even ask about that scene later where Sam Raimi has a cameo playing the guy that lends him the snow mobile thing, right? I mean, the people need to see that he gets a snow mobile thing from Sam Raimi. And when Halloran arrives at The Overlook and gets out of the snow mobile thing to brush the snow off the sign that says “The Overlook” even though the audience already knows that, you know, that’s The Overlook, we need that right?

SK: Quiet kid. Just remember Uncle Stevie’s rule.


MG: If it’s on the page, it stays.


SK: Got it. Now print me out a new picture of that Kubrick dude and tape it over that dart board yonder. I got things to do.


As King and Garris discuss in the commentary tracks, the miniseries is indeed the ideal format for a dense novel’s filming. It’s not easy to tell a 500+ page story in two hours of screentime, so the extended running length makes perfect sense.

But what Garris and King don’t realize is that a book is its own thing, one that exists on its own dimension inside the readers’ heads. We bring our own aesthetic to what we read--for whatever reason, I cast Elizabeth Mitchell and Kyle Chandler as the Torrances and resurrected Scatman Crothers from the grave to revisit Halloran--and so a literal word by word adaptation will almost always fall flat. Watching a bizzarely dreadful Melvin Van Peebles discuss his travel plans does absolutely nothing for the narrative. Just because it’s in the book does not, in ANY way require it to be filmed.

Likewise, a film can use its facilities to enhance its source material, be it through music, visuals, performances, or random touches. You know, like how Crothers' Halloran decorates his Florida condo:

No reason for it exactly, but it's memorable and interesting, something that makes us wonder a little more about the character. The miniseries never dares to embellish.

There is good inside 1997’s The Shining. Rebecca DeMornay and yes, Steve Wings Weber are quite strong as a couple on the edge, and both the loving and abusive scenes together are believably powerful.

As for the rest of the miniseries...well..the last shot was neat. Of course, before that we deal with Haunted Mansion caliber ghosts and Peebles' terrible line readings, heavy-handed musical cues and laughable CGI, plus a fatal step in miscasting that makes Danny a precocious 8-year-old that doesn’t know how to read. I won’t insult child actor Courtland Meade’s performance, as it’s not awful...just not right. I may have missed the exact moment where his age was discussed (for silly reasons involving me not understanding how to read a double sided disc, I was forced to download Part 2 en espanol and channel my inner 8th grade honors student to understand the dialogue) but either Danny is WAY too well-spoken for a 6 year old (who then graduates two years early in the film’s painful flash forward coda) or an 8-year-old with a learning disability, which doesn’t fit his clearly bright and well-spoken character in the least. Either way, WHAT IS GOING ON?

Also, his hair looks stupid.


Then there’s the time period, or lack thereof. Danny talks like a child of the 90s while The Overlook uses rotary phones and Dick Halloran dresses like Willie Dynamite circa 1971. I’m confused.

Plus now I just want to rewatch Wilie Dynamite.

But enough bashing of a not necessarily terrible way to spend 4.5 hours. It made Stephen King and most likely, those who believe an adaptation should be a book-on-film satisfied. I can’t imagine it entertaining someone who didn’t read the novel, but as an example of (in my opinion) what an adaptation shouldn’t be.


Also, I spotted a goof (Part 3, flowers moving before Wings comes into frame) and I NEVER spot goofs.


Oh, and the miniseries features a Ghost Dad coda that's way more hilarious than Ghost Dad.

Also, did I mention Danny's stupid haircut?

I don’t think Kubrick’s film is perfect, though I do cite it as a brilliant horror film and even more brilliant, if almost unrelated interpretation of a great read. I also don’t think Garris or King were wrong to revisit the material in their own manner. I just wish they remembered what film can do and actually tried to do it.

The Mother That Rocks the Cradle

I have a long, complicated relationship with the 1980 exploitation flick Mother’s Day. See, my dear parents are known for, among other things like being great parents, being fairly lax about regulating what I watched as a child. Hence, when my older brothers brought home what seemed like just another holiday-themed slasher from the video store, why WOULDN’T I be allowed to sit down in the basement and watch it?

For years, I just didn’t remember Mother’s Day as being anything other than another peg in the hillbilly horror field. Hence, when my friend asked me to bring a “scary movie” from my VHS collection to her 14th birthday party, there didn’t seem to be any obvious reason NOT to bring Mother’s Day. After all, she asked ME because I knew “scary movies” so wasn’t trusting my instinct enough?

There was a minor problem with grabbing Mother’s Day from the video pile: 

It’s a little rape-y.

Or a lot rape-y, depending on how you rank your rape-y scale. 

Needless to say, I was unofficially banned from choosing the movies for slumber parties for the rest of junior high, a shame since we never even got to watch Slumber Party Massacre. 

That being said, I hold no grudge against the original Mother’s Day. It’s a terrible film, but one with a fairly snappy satirical edge buried just beneath its oozing layers of sleaze. When I heard it was being remade (in what feels like a decade ago, based on Lionsgate’s odd 2-year holdout of the film), I was happy. Remaking a bad film makes a motherload more sense to me than mangling something as good as The Wicker Man or (breath held) Total Recall.

Quick Plot: It’s a dark night in the maternity ward when a woman disguised as a nurse sneaks out with a newborn, aided by a mysterious man who spills a ton of blood out of a night watchman. And that’s all before the credits start.

Cut to a nice and new suburban housewarming (or birthday, even though the lucky aging guest is never acknowledged) party in Wichita hosted by the Sohapis, a sad but (this being a movie) attractive couple. They’re just kicking back in the basement with an assortment of early thirtysomething friends amid tornado warnings when a trio of baddy bank robbers crash the living room. 

Bandit brothers Ike and Aadley frantically tend their youngest’s gunshot wound, wondering why their house looks so goshdarn different. Turns out, their family home was bought up by the Sohapis (and yes, there’s plenty of comment on that name) after mom Rebecca DeFrickenMornay and sis Lydia lost it. Of course, once a few partygoers come upstairs, the brothers can’t just hobble out with a few bodies in their wake...especially after they make a phone call to mom.

Played by the gracefully aging De Mornay, Mom is quite a piece of work. Polite, classy, and seemingly well-intentioned, all she wants is to keep her children safe and on their way with her to the international border, something that requires $10,000 that *should* have been delivered to her former home. Maybe it was, and maybe frazzled wifey Beth (My Bloody Valentine star Jamie King) or her cheating hubby Daniel have been hoarding it. Mother's Day uses the missing cash as a nice underlying threat. De Mornay might indeed have kept the evening (fairly) bloodless if there wasn't the slightest scent of distrust lingering in her old home.

But come one: is "fairly bloodless" what you're looking for in a remake of Mother's Day? Directed by Saw 2/3/4 and Repo! The Genetic Opera helmer Darren Lynn Bousman, Mother's Day certainly feels like a slicker, higher end straight-to-DVD genre flick. The cast includes plenty of recognizable faces, including  Frozen's Shawn Ashmore, Saw 2/3/4's Lyriq Bent, Step Up 2/Burning Bright's 65 year-old-chain-smoker-voice-in-a 20something body Brianna Evigan, and the stunning but generally awful Children of the Corn & Carrie remake's Kandyse McClure (in fairness, she's much more tolerable here). All are capable enough, though none quite rise to the icy coolness of Ms. De Mornay.

A little more problematic is the portrayal of her brood. The actors aren't necessarily bad, but there's just something lacking in the human monster aspect of the family. They're a scary bunch because of the things they do--pit friends against one another in a knife fight to the death, force pals into hand-to-hand combat to determine whose wife beds their dying virgin brother, etc.--but all are simply too clean and, let's face it, easy on the eyes to fully inhabit the Last House On the Left caliber monsters inside.

So yes, a little more sleaze would have been welcome. But isn't that always the case?

High Notes

At just eight minutes shy of two hours, Mother’s Day is certainly longer than most films of its type but never once did I feel the running length. Yes, there are a lot of characters, and while some are more memorable than others, it never feels like the film is wasting time on such a large cast. 

Between kitchen utensil combat and finding new uses for boiling water, Mother’s Day is quite enthusiastic about finding new means for violence. Even a grizzly gunshot is staged a little differently, with half a head just subtly (did I say that?) oozing in the background of a surprise kill

Low Notes

By no definition is the original a better film, but the one thing it had that seems mostly lacking in the remake is the slightest edge of satire. In the 1980 version's case, it came out in the hillbilly son characters, all of whose understandings of females and sex seemed violently culled from television. Bousman's Mother's Day has hints of subtext in how the family lost their home, but it's never fully explored in a way that makes it feel any more relevant than 'what have you done to my house?' 

SPOILER

I’m all for girl power, but having the ending miraculously revive not one, but two female characters so that they can have a Sex And the City-like epilogue (which, admittedly, is then crashed by kidnapping and stuff) feels a little cheap. Bousman DOES address this in the commentary and admits that the ending(s) were easily his least favorite part of the film, so it’s not entirely unfair to chalk it up to studio meddling

SPOILERS DONE

Lessons Learned

Don’t bark: wait, and then bite

The best housewarming gift one can give: Ginsu knives

When will people learn? Cut the hand ties first, gag next. The person you free can ungag themselves, and doing so yourself (first!) just wastes precious seconds of escape time

Random Law &Order: SVU Connections Galore

Let me tell you something folks: this film is a GOLD MINE of SVU guest star territory. Just about everyone in the cast stopped by Special Victims at some point, including Mother herself who got to play a parapalegic lawyer who, it turns out, has been faking her paralysis for years to guilt her husband after his affairs. It’s hilarious, but not quite as hilarious as “Families,” an episode that costarred “Ike” actor Patrick John Flueger as a young man whose girlfriend is found dead, discovered to have been pregnant by him, who, funny story, was disapproved of by her family not because he wasn’t a nice guy, but because his father actually had an affair with HER mother 18 years earlier and--get this--it turns out that those crazy lovebirds were actually siblings, thusly prompting one of my favorite soundbites in L&O:SVU history:

“I had SEX with MY SISTER?”

Not quite on the same level as “Can you think of any reason why someone would want to sodomize your husband with a banana?”, but still. You can understand my excitement at the IMDB path of Mother’s Day.

And fun fact: cowriter of the original’s script was Warren Leight, renown playwright and current showrunner of a little program called--whaddya know?--Law & Order: SVU. 

Rent/Bury/Buy

I found Mother's Day to be the definition of a pleasant surprise. It doesn't revolutionize the genre, but it's a GOOD genre film made with skill in front of and behind the camera. Considering how many easy routes Bousman could have taken with the material, I think what he does--create a fairly complex narrative for what is essentially a simple home invasion--is admirable. Why it was shelved for two years is beyond me, but let’s hope its possible DVD success is attributed to it being a good, hard horror movie and not just another lazy remake. Take notes folks! There’s a reason this film works, and it has next to nothing to do with being based on preexisting film material.