We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
Movies about a fake child in real danger, and a real child in fake danger.
ORPHAN: FIRST KILL (2022)
Thirteen years ago, the horror thriller Orphan introduced us to Esther, a 9-year-old girl who is adopted by a family… and then turns out to be thirty-something serial killer Leena Klammer, who is able to pass herself off as a child because she has a hormonal disorder called hypopituitarism. It was a terrific twist that allowed a film that looked like another take on The Bad Seed to become something else entirely. Esther/Leena was played by Isabelle Fuhrman, who was around 10 or 11 when she was on set, making it easy for her to pass as a 9-year-old herself. Now Fuhrman is an adult, but that hasn’t stopped her from reprising the role of Esther in the prequel Orphan: First Kill.
“How can Fuhrman possibly look like a 9-year-old again?” is a big question most have about Orphan: First Kill, so we’ll get that out of the way right up front. Using a mixture of in-camera tricks, stand-ins, and most likely some digital effects, director William Brent Bell and his crew were able to make Fuhrman look like a little kid. She doesn’t look exactly like she did in Orphan and some suspension of disbelief is required, and it can be jarring and amusing when Fuhrman is obviously replaced by an actual child for some shots, but it works well enough to get by. And it’s easy to accept, because having Fuhrman back in the role all these years later is better than having someone else play the character.
“First Kill” sounds good for marketing, but it’s not quite accurate for the screenplay David Coggeshall wrote (working from a story by Alex Mace and the first Orphan’s writer David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick). Leena Klammer is already known to be a dangerous criminal by the time the film begins. We find her locked away in a psychiatric facility. It’s implied that she has already killed. There seems to be room for another prequel to be made that’s set before this one. And maybe we’ll get that if Orphan: First Kill is successful enough.
Starting the prequel in that dreary European psychiatric facility was an odd choice (and gave me negative flashbacks to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre prequel Leatherface), but thankfully – like Leatherface and Michael Myers before her – Leena is able to escape from that place rather early on. And then we find out exactly how and why she took on the name Esther. As it turns out, Esther was the name of a missing child, the daughter of Connecticut-based Allen Albright (Rossif Sutherland) and his wife Tricia (Julia Stiles). After learning about the Albright missing persons case online, Leena decides to pretend to be Esther. She comes up with a story about Esther being abducted and taken off to Russia, and now she has escaped. She contacts the authorities, the authorities contact the Albrights, and Tricia comes to bring her home.
It’s once Esther starts trying to settle into the Albright home, around the 25 minute point, that Orphan: First Kill finds its footing and really starts to get interesting. Here we have Esther infiltrating a family like in the first Orphan, she even gets a sibling in the deal – Matthew Finlan as the teenage Gunnar, who seems oddly uncaring toward his long-lost sister – but Bell and the writers were careful not to make First Kill a copy of the 2009 movie. The presence of the suspicious Inspector Donnan (Hiro Kanagawa) leads the film off into its own unique direction, and the story takes some interesting twists and turns along the way. The twist in the first Orphan made the movie something better than it initially appeared to be, and I would say the same about what happens in Orphan: First Kill. I went into both of these movies with low expectations, and they both ended up impressing me in their own ways.
A lot of years have gone by, but Fuhrman hasn’t lost her grasp on the Esther character. I never expected to see her play this role again, but I’m glad this unexpected prequel came along and gave us the opportunity. And like the first time around, Fuhrman had a solid supporting cast to bounce off of in this one, with Stiles doing some great work as Tricia Albright.
The existence of this movie is a surprise to me, and it turns out to have been a good surprise. If you liked Orphan, you’ll probably get some entertainment out of watching Orphan: First Kill.
The review of Orphan: First Kill originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
LAST ACTION HERO (1993)
Known for its script problems (the original spec script by Zak Penn and Adam Leff passed through the hands of at least five different writers, including credited screenwriters Shane Black and David Arnott) and for being a box office disappointment, Last Action Hero still isn’t a highly regarded film in the Arnold Schwarzenegger oeuvre. But while it certainly has its issues, it’s actually a better, more entertaining movie than its reputation might lead you to believe.
Of course, my tolerance of Last Action Hero may be enhanced by the fact that I was almost the exact same age as lead character Danny Madigan when the movie was first released. Austin O’Brien (born in 1981, so two years older than me) plays Danny, a youngster who is a major film fan... much like I was and still am. Danny is particularly knowledgeable when it comes to the action genre, and his favorite action franchise is the Jack Slater series, which stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as Jack Slater. When his elderly pal Nick (Robert Prosky) offers to give Danny a personal midnight preview screening of Jack Slater IV, Danny makes sure to be there, even though his mom has no idea he’s leaving their apartment in the middle of the night. Nick makes the whole thing even fancier by welcoming Danny with a golden ticket that was given to him by Harry Houdini. The ticket is torn in half, Danny takes his seat. And just minutes into the movie, Danny finds that his world and the reality of the movie are blending together. Right before he ends up in the movie, riding in the backseat of Jack Slater’s convertible during a chase sequence.
Danny could use the ticket to go back into his own world, but first he sticks around and enjoys being Jack’s sidekick as Jack seeks to avenge his cousin – who was killed by Tony Vivaldi (Anthony Quinn) and a hitman called Mr. Benedict (Charles Dance). Danny also likes being in close proximity to Jack’s college-age daughter Whitney (Bridgette Wilson), who has surprisingly little screen time given that we saw Danny ogling the actress’s Jack Slater IV promotional standee early in the movie. Then before Danny gets a chance to use the ticket, Mr. Benedict has gotten his hands on it and crosses over into Danny’s reality – so Danny and Jack have to follow him out of the movie and stop him. Before they can bring him to justice, he pulls The Ripper (Tom Noonan), the serial killer villain of Jack Slater III, into Danny’s reality with him and sends him to kill the real Arnold Schwarzenegger at the Jack Slater IV premiere.
Director John McTiernan admittedly had trouble finding the right tone for this movie – and on his audio commentary, even apologizes for the movie because it’s all over the place. The core idea of the movie was great, but some questionable decisions were made while the studio and the many screenwriters were re-thinking and reworking the execution of that idea. Instead of dropping Danny into a version of an action movie that’s funny simply because Danny is aware of all of the clichés (which would have made this an action version of Scream or There’s Nothing Out There), the filmmakers drop him into something that’s already a parody of action movies. In fact, Jack Slater’s reality is so cartoony that one of his fellow police officers is even an actual cartoon, an animated cat called Whiskers. So things have a tendency to be way over-the-top and ridiculous. But some of the movie’s goofiness is fun, and I enjoy watching Danny’s interactions with Jack. Charles Dance is also a lot of fun to watch as he chews up the scenery as Mr. Benedict, a man who really loves being evil and sees a lot of potential for doing horrible things in Danny’s reality. Noonan is also reliably creepy as the axe-wielding Ripper... and Ian McKellen also makes a great appearance near the end of the film as that old scythe-wielder Death himself, pulled out of the film The Seventh Seal by the magic ticket.
Watching Last Action Hero, you can see why it failed, and it’s obvious enough that it makes you wonder why the filmmakers weren’t aware they were making a mess of things before they even headed into production. But it’s an entertaining failure, and I can see some of my child self reflected in the Danny character, making this a fun movie to go back to all these decades later.
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