|
Written by Midnight Butterfly
|
|
Monday, 10 November 2008 09:55 |
|
Page 2 of 2 Pretty? How about some of the most gruesome and bizarre images ever captured on film? Jack coming back from the dead still shredded from the wolf attack and promptly stealing toast off David's plate; a wolf biting off a man's head and the head bouncing off a car like basketball off a backboard; a man discussing methods of suicide with a gallery of bloody corpses; most searing of all -- a man fully turning into a wolf, on-screen, right before your very eyes. It's all sickeningly realized and ridiculously enjoyable. The real star of the film is, of course, Rick Baker and his team of artists. This movie made Baker a hallowed name in geek and movie buff circles and deservedly so. After all, the transformation into the wolf is the showpiece for any werewolf picture. The transformation here is a dazzling display of gleeful goriness and stunning virtuosity. It is also logical in as much as such a scene can be called logical. As David changes he is in agony. The pain of the transformation is what makes it. Actually watching and feeling the morphing of the bones is excruciating. Nowadays the skull of a human actually changing shape into the skull of a wolf happens all the time but in 1981 this was still new (of course, The Howling, another near-classic, came out the same year. Before that though, Jack Pierce's yak hair get-up for Lon Chaney Jr. in The Wolf Man was still the pinnacle.). Of course, An American Werewolf in London and The Howling were both created before the advent of CGI which makes them all the more impressive. Another point: the work by foley artist Tony Lenny is extraordinary. When a hand is transmogrifying into a monstrous paw and the audience can hear the stretching and crackling of the bones inside the moist flesh it is deliciously disgusting. Moments later the sound of the spine bending into monstrous shape is so hideous that just has to be what it really sounds like when your vertebrae actually, physically alter.
| 
|
| I don't know that there had ever been a cinematic experience quite like watching Jack Goodman steadily deteriorate over the course of subsequent visits from the grave. He starts out, literally, as a bloody pulp and gets worse from there. His initial appearance after being killed, with his neck completely gutted and half his face torn away, is still remarkable. The sheer magnitude of the blood and the gore generates much of the humor and overall aesthetic of the movie. By the end Jack's flesh is gone and he is only a green skeleton sitting in the back row of a porn movie theatre with a veritable legion of bloody corpses in tow. You can just imagine Baker and his crew cheerily destroying the actors' faces in delighted anticipation of the effect they would have on the audience. These are astonishing images, repulsive and very, very funny. For instance, Jack is, after all, only doing what a best friend should: he's trying to save David from himself. He warns David about what the entire audience knows but David himself can't believe because he's the one stuck in the middle of it: that David is a monster and is going to kill people. David might be the tragic-hero of the picture but Jack is the un-dead, rotting heart of it. Werewolf added an interesting wrinkle to werewolf lore: that the victims of a werewolf attack roam the earth as grisly ghosts until the werewolf bloodline is severed, until the last one is killed. Ouch.
|
A word on Jenny Agutter. Somewhere on-line I'm sure there is a list of queens of screen fantasy. I'm sure that on that list are the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis, Carrie Ann-Moss(Trinity), Carrie Fisher(Princess Leia), Karen Black and others. I would be shocked if Jenny Agutter was not near the top of those lists. She first came to geek boys' attention in the fabled Green Dress of Logan's Run. For my money though her appearance here as nurse Alex Price is the one that catapults her to legendary status. She's everything a young man's nurse fantasy should be. She has the eyes, the outfit, a delectable accent and she loves the hero despite the fact that he is epically flawed – every boy's dream. To her credit, Agutter also gives a solid performance, making her Alex a real woman. The scene where she is compelled to force-feed David so that she can give him his pills is one of the great scenes of genuine flirting in movies. You watch both the characters suddenly discover their intense attraction for each other – and it's delightful. Here's to Jenny Agutter, one of the great girlfriend fantasies for nerds in all of moviedom.
| 
|
| You can't talk about An American Werewolf in London and not talk about the Slaughtered Lamb. (“No, really. What kind of ad is that for a pub?”) Back in the Universal days European villagers haunted by strange superstitions were a staple of any good horror film. The scene in the Slaughtered Lamb is right up there with any of them, a classic of its kind. It sets the tone for the rest of the movie intermingling, as it does, dread and comedy. The name itself is hysterical and you know that somewhere, someone is just nutty enough to give their pub a name like that. (Of course, now there is a tavern, the Slaughtered Lamb, in the middle of Greenwich Village.) You can't help but squirm for David and Jack underneath the uncomfortable stares of the Lamb's regulars. Brian Glover, Lila Kaye, David Schofield and all of the actors in the Slaughtered Lamb create indelible characters and a suffocating environment in just a few short strokes. That the gallows humor of the pub is rooted in a grim acceptance of the reality the characters live in is typical of the human condition in general and the British psyche in particular.
|
Whether or not An American Werewolf in London is an actual “classic” it has certainly withstood the test of time. It's still horrific, still funny, still honoring its pedigree and still influential. There is much of it that recalls it's own cinematic past, yet none of it is cynical or overly reverential. The passion of the artists is apparent. It's the landmark achievement in their career for many of them. There are CGI transformation scenes in recent movies that will look like Disney cartoons years from now but watching David's face extend into a snout is still harrowing. The special effects Academy award was created specifically for this movie. Mostly, the dark underside of the male psyche that Landis fashions into his phantasmagoria is still real and still having an impact on the world around us. An American Werewolf in London remains an immensely enjoyable example of personal film-making, a glowing example of what happens when movies are made by people who love movies.
| 
|
|
|
Last Updated ( Wednesday, 12 November 2008 20:00 )
|
