A '90s hit, arty horror, true terror, and wild dogs.
THE BODYGUARD (1992)
Lawrence Kasdan first wrote the screenplay for The Bodyguard in 1975, at which time he was envisioning Steve McQueen in the lead role. The movie almost happened in 1978, with John Boorman directing and Ryan O'Neal and Diana Ross as the stars. But it worked out for the best that it took seventeen years for The Bodyguard to go from script to screen, because when the movie finally did come out in 1992 it was a huge deal. Directed by Mick Jackson, the version of The Bodyguard that was made starred Kevin Costner, at the height of his popularity, and Whitney Houston, a singer making her acting debut at a time when she was one of the biggest stars in the world.
I was only eight years old when this movie reached theatres, but it was clear to me that it was an event. Houston recorded several songs for the film, since her character is also a singer/actress, and most of those songs became massive hits, as did the film - it made about $411 million at the global box office, which would be around $756 million in 2020 dollars.
I didn't see the movie on the big screen, but I do have memories from when it was released on VHS and my mom rented it so we could watch it together as a family. I know for sure mom, my maternal grandmother, and my brother were watching it with me that day... And until this year, that VHS viewing was the only time I ever watched The Bodyguard. I knew it was a pop culture phenomenon, but the movie itself was never actually a big deal to me personally. I thought the movie was fine.
Watching it nearly thirty years later, I find that it still provides a decent viewing experience. Costner turns in a cool performance as bodyguard Frank Farmer, who used to be in the Secret Service and is still kicking himself over the fact that he wasn't working the day Reagan was shot. Frank isn't interested in working as the bodyguard for Houston's character Rachel Marron, a singer who has been nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, but he ends up taking the job to protect Rachel from a stalker who has been sending threatening notes, broke into her house to masturbate on a bed, and sent a bomb to her dressing room.
There are a few thrilling moments in the movie, but its primary focus is the rocky relationship that forms between Frank and Rachel. She thinks his security measures are too extreme, she falls in love with him, he loves her but can't allow himself to give in to those feelings, someone keeps trying to shoot her or blow her up, etc. There are some nice twists and turns, and Houston sings a couple songs that were nominated for Best Original Song Oscars. One of the most popular songs was not an original; "I Will Always Love You" was a cover of a Dolly Parton song. At one point, before the Houston version kicks in, Frank and Rachel listen to a different cover of the song that was recorded by John Doe.
This still isn't a movie I'll be revisiting frequently, but I think I liked it better in 2020 than I did in 1993.
DARLING (2015)
While watching writer/director Mickey Keating's film Darling, I began wondering what the script must have looked like, because there couldn't have been much to it at all. The movie's 76 minutes primarily consist of the title character (that's not her name, but it's the only thing anyone refers to her by in the movie) silently wandering around in the rooms of the old New York mansion she has been hired to take care of while the owner - a character known only as Madame and played by Sean Young - is away. Other things do happen, but not much, and there's very little talking along the way. But how do you write for an hour, give or take, of a person just walking through various rooms alone? Then I saw that Keating actually addressed this in an interview, saying he wrote "a few pages of dialogue", but crafting the script was like making a comic book because he filled it with drawings, basically storyboarding the film and using those drawings as the script. Much like the way Mad Max: Fury Road was planned out.
There are interesting things in Darling, although I can't say I was interested for the entire 76 minutes. It went with it, though, because I liked Mac Fisken's stark black and white cinematography, and I find Lauren Ashley Carter, who plays Darling, to be a fascinating actress to watch. She carries this movie on her shoulders while saying hardly anything. In another interview, I saw Carter say that she's often told that her face is too expressive for certain characters - but that's definitely not an issue here, where we need her expressiveness to get us through the movie.
It's not clear exactly what's going on in Darling, and whether or not there's an evil force lurking in the house. There are creepy stories told about this house; the previous caretaker committed suicide there, and some say that a lunatic used to live there and perform rituals to try to conjure the devil. Darling finds an upside down cross in the house, and some kind of invocation scratched into a wall. So that could be the reason why terrible things happen by the end of the movie. Or maybe Darling is just insane.
Whatever the case, Keating and Carter succeeded in making a stylish, artistic movie that wasn't exactly for me, but which I respected.
TRUE TERROR WITH ROBERT ENGLUND (2020)
There are only six episodes in the first season of the Travel Channel's new anthology series True Terror with Robert Englund, but there are eighteen separate horror stories packed into those episodes, as each episode features three stories of varying lengths. The fact that this show is airing on the Travel Channel probably gives you a good idea what sort of content to expect from these stories - they don't go too far, but some of them might give the creeps.
What's really interesting about True Terror is the fact that is serves as something of a history lesson. Every story told in this series claims to be lifted directly from newspaper articles published throughout the 19th century and into the early decades of the 20th century; they take place between 1848 and 1930. I didn't look up every one of them to verify that they were indeed discussed in old newspapers, but I did look up a few and found that the show wasn't lying about them, they had been written about in the past. The writers might have added some details here and there, but they were working from historical reports, and there were only one or two of these events that I had heard about before.
I certainly don't believe everything in this show actually happened, I'm a skeptic about most of these things, but I do believe that the people involved with the incidents thought this is what was going on.
Subjects covered in these episodes include nightmarish premonitions, vengeful ghosts, cryptids, animal attacks, witchcraft, bloodsuckers, a serial killer called the Axe Man, and even a dragon. It's clear that True Terror did not have a large budget to work with, so the special effects aren't likely to blow anybody away, but I'm forgiving about these things. The CGI dragon is dodgy, sure, but it gets the point across well enough and it's interesting to find out that some cowboys thought they saw a dragon flying around Arizona a couple hundred years ago.
The setting of these stories was very appealing to me, as I'm always advocating for the horror and western genres to get mashed together more often, and since the majority of the stories take place in the 1800s this was horror-western bliss.
Robert Englund does a fine job as the host of this show, presenting all of the stories as he stands in a street outside an old building in the middle of the night. Englund is not in Freddy mode, he's not a cackling Cryptkeeper type, he's basically just himself, here to share some stories with the viewer in a matter-of-fact sort of way. This is about giving you an unsettling history lesson, remember, not about tormenting you. Of course, I'm sure it's no coincidence that a story in the first episode gives Englund the chance to say things like "Could his nightmare be real?" and "If dreams can come true, so can nightmares."
As Englund provides narration in a "let me tell you a campfire story" tone, the stories are also helped along by interviews with various "talking heads"; historians, paranormal experts and investigators, even a couple horror filmmakers.
If you're into horror and American history, and if the low budget television look isn't too much of a hurdle for you to get over, this show is a pleasant way to spend six hours.
The True Terror review originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
NIGHT OF THE WILD (2015)
Night of the Wild is an unusual entry in the filmography of Eric Red. Primarily known as a screenwriter, since he got his start scripting films like The Hitcher and Near Dark, he has also directed a handful of films, my favorite of them being the werewolf flick Bad Moon (which is surprising, since I wasn't into it when I first saw it as a kid in the '90s). Night of the Wild was only a directorial effort for Red, he didn't write this one - that credit goes to Delondra Williams.
As release from The Asylum, this movie is similar to a zombie outbreak movie or Stephen King's Maximum Overdrive. A meteor shower causes a horrific event that sees human beings being brutally attacked and killed in small town America... but the threat here isn't flesh-eating, walking corpses or vehicles driving themselves. Here there's something about these meteorites that drives dogs to start tearing into every living being around them.
At the center of the story is a family that includes college student Rosalyn (Tristin Mays), her father Dave (Rob Morrow), her stepmother Sara (Kelly Rutherford), little Danielle (Carmen Tonry), and Rosalyn's elderly dog Shep, who everyone suggests she should have put down - even before dogs start attacking people - just because he's old. He's perfectly healthy, he just happens to have gone deaf... And when the dog attacks do start, Shep is the only one who remains a good boy.
Night of the Wild is an unexpectedly troubling movie. Dog attacks are not a very enjoyable thing to watch, and hundreds of dogs turning violent also means that the movie is packed with dogs being killed. Definitely not fun. There are some questionable moments, and it even has an unnecessary mean streak at times, especially in the scene where a pregnant woman is shown being mauled by dogs. That's a little further than a movie like this should go.
The movie does have plenty of mayhem on display, but I would say the main reason to seek it out would be just to be a completist and see everything Red has worked on.
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