13 FOR HALLOWEEN #10: Burke & Hare

It’s not John Wayne or James Stewart or Lee Marvin or even Edmond O’Brien who gets the key line in John Ford’s ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ – it’s Carleton Young as Maxwell Scott: “When the truth becomes legend, print the legend.”

In John Landis’s ‘Burke & Hare’, it’s a more a case of: “Is there even much of a legend anyway? Fuck it, just print any old bollocks.”

And so it is that we have Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis as Williams Burke and Hare – the latter cast after David Tennant dropped out, and I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like with Pegg and Tennant trading quips and making mayhem (Serkis gives a by-the-numbers performance, mugging through his scenes as if fully aware that he was the second choice) – two ne’er-do-wells trying make it rich in 1820s Edinburgh. The rivalry between anatomists Dr Robert Knox (Tom Wilkinson) and Professor Alexander Monro (Tim Curry) is turning nasty.

When Monro uses forged documentation to ensure that the bodies of any hanged in the city are delivered immediately to him for dissection – and with the militia patrolling cemeteries to discourage grave-robbers – Knox makes no bones, pardon the pun, about accepting corpses that have been, how to put this, encouraged along the way to meeting their maker.

‘Burke & Hare’ was produced through the then newly revived Ealing Studios and Landis has said in interview that he wanted to capture the spirit of classic black comedies such as ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ or ‘The Ladykillers’. And there’s no doubt that the material lends itself to a certain kind of mordant humour. But whereas ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ was elegant in its multiple murders and social satire, and ‘The Ladykillers’ played out as essentially a comedy of manners with bumbling thugs, Landis struggles to find – and indeed sustain – a tone for ‘Burke & Hare’. Some scenes are pure slapstick; some trade in humour so dark (such as the pair’s attempt to force a horse-drawn carriage off the road) that the punchline just withers and dies; and some are mawkish, particularly in matters pertaining to Burke’s infatuation with ambitious musical hall actress Ginny (Isla Fisher), an entirely fictionalised subplot which goes nowhere despite Fisher’s wholehearted performance.

Ultimately, Landis shores up the whole edifice with a parade of famous, and sometimes incongruous, faces: Christopher Lee and Jenny Agutter in nothing roles, Hugh Bonneville as an aristocrat with an agenda, Bill Bailey as a fourth-wall-breaking hangman, fellow directors Michael Winner and Costa-Gavras (I can only assume they visited the set and found themselves bundled into costumes), and Ronnie Corbert as the most unconvincing leader of a troop of militia in the entire history of moving pictures.

‘Burke & Hare’ could have been a taut and fast-paced piece of work with darkly comedic overtones; as it is, it kind of ambles along with the amiability of a shaggy dog story, enjoyable enough in an undemanding way while you’re watching, but leaving you feeling just a tad short-changed as the end credits roll.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #8: Homecoming

Just as Dario Argento and John Carpenter enjoyed something of a renaissance with their work for ‘Masters of Horror’ after, respectively, a period of creative asininity and a period of inactivity, so too Joe Dante delivered something pretty damn good after working fairly consistently in TV but not producing anything of note. Like Argento and Carpenter, Dante directed two episodes of the series. His season one offering, ‘Homecoming’, was one of the show’s high points.

At once a zombie film, a morality tale and a political satire – kind of like ‘Day of the Dead’ meets ‘Bob Roberts’ based on a treatment by the Brothers Grimm – it’s sharply scripted, deftly directed and studs its often hilariously funny narrative with occasional and genuinely poignant grace notes.

Our protagonist is David Murch (Jon Tenney), a political publicist trying to whip up some patriotic fervour as the incumbent and avowedly pro-military president fights a re-election campaign. POTUS – such as Murch breathlessly refers to the prez on every possible occasion – is never named, but seems to be an amalgam of Clinton and Bush the younger. During a live TV debate with a woman who’s lost her son in an overseas campaign, Murch corpses on air as he remembers his long-dead brother, himself a vet. He struggles to recover, assuring the grieving mother that “I wish I could bring them all back”.

Murch thinks he’s blow his credibility, but the president is delighted and starts using the phrase in speeches. All of sudden Murch is the Capital Hill golden boy and attracts power-hungry pundit Jane Cleaver (Thea Gill), who sees him as her ticket into the administrative inner sanctum. Opinion polls are up and the re-election looks like it’s in the bag. Then something unexpected happens: soldiers who were killed in action start coming back from the dead. And they want to vote.

The political satire boils down to one joke, casually sustained: what if the people you’d really fucked off – the people who’d died on your watch – could still punch that ballot paper? It’s bolstered by two good performances. Tenney portrays Murch as human Teflon, a man wedded to his mobile phone and thinking more moves ahead that your average chess champion. Visiting a cemetery with his elderly mother, he tries to be deferential by not answering his perpetually bleating phone; the look on his face as he virtually has to force himself not to reach for it like a gunslinger going for his pistol is priceless. Gill plays Cleaver as a comic-book Machiavellian seductress, va-va-voom and a brutal lack of sentiment bundled together in a short skirt and a pair of killer heels.

The zombies – keep an eye out for the names on the headstones when they claw they way out of their graves – are perhaps the cleanest, least maggoty bunch of the undead that pop culture has given us. There’s a wonderful scene where a young man, his life obviously thrown away in a pointless conflagration before it had really begun, plunders into a pizza parlour. The owner and his wife sit him down – he reminds them of their son, also overseas – and begin the slow process of communicating with him. He presents no threat to them, and vice versa. The family dog sidles up to him, also aware there’s no danger, and is duly fussed. It’s a lovely moment, unforced and not overly-sentimentalised. And quite apposite for a film where the only danger from a zombie infestation is to the politicians they can turf out of office.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #1: An American Werewolf in London

There’s a scene about halfway through John Landis’s ‘An American Werewolf in London’ where American backpacker David Kessler (David Naughton) – the survivor of a wolf attack on barren North English moor and latterly the victim of ghostly visitations by a victim of said lycanthrope – tries to convince kindly nurse and potential new girlfriend Alex Price (Jenny Agutter) that his injuries are coterminous with feral behaviour come the full moon. She responds with the calm rationality of any good healthcare professional (which is to say, she doesn’t believe him). Frustrated, trying to find a way of explaining the situation, he clutches at a filmic analogy: “Have you ever seen ‘The Wolfman’?”

“With Oliver Reed?” she asks.

Shaking his head, he counters that he’s referring to the Bela Lugosi/Lon Chaney Jnr/Claude Raines original, but before he’s two sentences into a plot synopsis Alex is giggling at the absurdity of it.

For me, this moment nails the charm and brilliance of the film. Because I have absolutely no doubt that if David had replied, “Yeah, the one with Oliver Reed”, Alex would have nodded seriously and urged him to continue. For all that ‘An American Werewolf in London’ has “werewolf” in the title, starts with a wolf attack, throws in a totally fucked up dream sequence involving werewolves with submachine guns in German uniforms, and features a full-on transformation sequence followed by plenty of bloody lycanthropic mayhem, what it’s really about is the culture clash.

As a Brit, I often cringe when films by American directors are set in Britain and every fucking shot of London features Tower Bridge, Big Ben, the South Bank, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Millennium Dome or the Millennium Eye. It’s akin to someone shooting a film in my home town of Nottingham and every exterior featuring the Robin Hood statue, Nottingham Castle and Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem (one of the oldest pubs in the UK). Yes, all of those things are an integral part of the place, but they shouldn’t be taken as utterly representative of it.

‘An American Werewolf in London’ takes a good 20 minutes to even get the luckless David to the capital city, and when it does his first experience of the metropolis is a functional bed in an antiseptic hospital. The only concession to fantastyland is to have a nurse who looks like Jenny Agutter take a fancy to him! (This would normally be the point at which this review veers off into a 2,000 word appreciation of Ms Agutter, only I don’t want to get divorced so I’ll let it go. Suffice it to say, keep an eye out for tomorrow’s Something For The Weekend gallery.)

From hereon in, the London that David moves through – first as a bemused foreigner, later as a feral beast – is a milieu of nondescript terraces, shadowy and litter-strewn alleyways, grubby phone boxes graffiti’d with “Sex Pistols”, seedy adult cinemas and crowded journeys on the Underground, the carriages packed with dour businessmen and aggressive-looking punks. The only vaguely touristy shot in the whole film relegates Tower Bridge to the background while a group of winos in a scrapyard warm themselves around a brazier.

But it’s not all grim locations, lopped off heads and fucking big teeth. ‘An American Werewolf in London’ is often outright hilarious. From David and Jack (Griffin Dunne)’s bickering as they hike across the moors to the (in)hospitality of the landlady and regulars at the Slaughtered Lamb (greatest pub name ever!), from David’s naked escape from a zoo to the inspired absurdity of a group of undead victims confronting their killer while watching a skin flick, Landis keeps the chuckles and the chills in perfect balance.

On the subject of the naked escape from the zoo, and in penance for the shameless amount of cheesecake shots that I fill this blog with when I can’t be bothered to actually write an article, here’s one for the ladies: David in all his zoo-escaping, birthday suited glory.

I always get a laugh out of the wolf looking David straight in the crotch; likewise the moment when David, sequestered behind a bush to preserve his modesty, beckons over a young lad holding a bunch of balloons. “I’ll give you a pound,” he hisses. The lad, quite rightly, shakes his head. “I’ll give you two pounds.” The lad, less wisely, walks over. “Mother,” the boy reports a few seconds later, “a naked American man just stole my balloons.” Balloons nicked, streaking Yank and no two pounds – magnficient!

(Incidentally, ‘An American Werewolf in London’ isn’t the only hirsute and howling at the moon title being featured in 13 for Halloween. If you wanna know what the other one is, I’ll see you next Wednesday.)