Possession (Andrzej Zulawski, 1981)

Andrzej Zulawski's Possession does not begin as a horror film, but it certainly feels scary from the start. Mark (Sam Neill) returns after a long absence from some sort of top-secret work to find his wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani), asking for a divorce. Mark is bewildered and, thanks to Zulawski's style and writing, so is the audience. Characters have cryptic conversations that leave tense space around the few, vague words. And these are the face-to-face chats; phone calls prove even more brief and confusing. For the remainder of the first hour, Possession unfolds less as a monster movie than a harrowing, exaggerated yet perversely insightful view of a marriage in total collapse. Zulawski wrote the film in the midst of his own messy divorce, and the swirling escalation of mutual loathing and violence serves as an exorcism of his pain.

Or, at least, that might have been the case had the film not gradually morphed into something even more terrifying and all-consuming, turning the film from a purge of self into a scorching of the Earth. What begins a repulsive display of two people locked in a private war ends up a unbearably nihilistic work worthy of H.P. Lovecraft. Like the great author's writing, Possession moves beyond human evil to touch upon a more unfathomable, vast energy that makes even the vicious fighting between the couple irrelevant. Yet Zulawski, whether out of the budgetary limitations that prevent a full-on dive into Lovecraft or merely his own writing skill, bridges the mortal with the cosmic. For the nightmarish horrors that eventually burst out of this demented film all stem from the various kinds of evil on display in the, for lack of a better term, "more realistic" scenes. Set in the shadow of the Berlin Wall and powered by sexual aggression and fear, Possession expands its contemporary and intimate anxieties ever outward until, at last, the universe goes nova.

The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993)

My love of the handful of Jane Campion works I've seen inexplicably failed to get me to watch The Piano with any speed. Happily, I finally got the chance to rectify my error for Spectrum Culture, and now I'm kicking myself even harder for waiting so long. Like all the other Campion movies I've seen, this is fantastic, feminocentric yet universal in its scope and emotional resonance. Her direction should rank her among the all-time greats, and her marginalization post-Piano is outrageous. The Piano in particular turns the period piece on its ear, breaking up convention at every turn with her idiosyncratic, singular camera. Its anti-male gaze distance ironically affected me more than the usual intimate, forced wringing of emotional response. It's not my favorite Campion film, but I can see why it won the Palme D'Or.

My full thoughts are over at Spectrum Culture.

Steven Spielberg: Jurassic Park

At five stages in his career, Steven Spielberg has directed two films in the same year. In each case, both are targeted at a large crowd -- whenever is a Spielberg feature not? -- but one clearly exists to be a massive crowd-pleaser while the other, however grand in scope, is more personal. Usually, the films also offset each other, tackling some unifying aspect from different angles. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade showed Spielberg setting his father themes to rest for awhile, and, appropriately, the more low-key Always dealt with the theme of letting go. Nearly two decades later, War of the Worlds sought to capture the pandemonium of being trapped in the sensory overload of a sudden assault, while Munich dealt with those 9/11-inspired themes with a more analytical oversight.

The link between Jurassic Park and Schindler's List is not immediately as clear, for reasons one can only hope are obvious. Yet the adaptation of a Michael Crichton thriller about recreated dinosaurs and a biopic of a key symbolic figure of the Holocaust do have one element in common: both deal with the arrogance and tyranny of mankind. Schindler's List surveys our capacity for evil against each other; Jurassic Park demonstrates man's constant exploitation of the Earth.

Of course, the film is also, first and foremost, a thriller, and it demonstrates that Spielberg lost not an ounce of his ability to terrify in the two decades separating this film from Jaws. The opening scene sets the mind a-reel: a giant cage being shoved against a gate as men who look like mere foremen carry guns and tasers looking uneasy. Some kind of beast is inside the lumbering metal box, and when a worker lifts a gate for transfer, the unseen creature charges, knocking back the cage and sending the poor man plummeting into the the animal's mouth. The ensuing frenzy bewilders: what is in that cage? How can it move so fast yet be powerful enough to toss a large man around like a rag doll? The suspense still works years later, after we all know what's in that cage and, furthermore, that the tossing around is honestly ridiculous and more a blatant nod to the woman being whipped to and fro in the water. Spielberg, master of effects, makes them felt even in a scene where the dinosaurs are not visible.

Where Jurassic Park breaks from Jaws, however, is in the weakness of the actual human beings in front of the camera. Technical delays permitted constant rewrites of the Jaws script into one of the best screenplays of all time, a mainstream blockbuster with fully realized characters with motives and pathos. Everyone in Jurassic Park now looks less fluid than the 20-year-old computer animation, which has held up astonishingly well. Indeed, the dinosaur animation of this film, save for a few iffy spots generally involving too many creatures on-screen, looks better than a great deal of current work.

But those damn characters. The issue is evident immediately: in the badlands of Montana, paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and paleobotanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) dig up a velociraptor fossil as a group of tourists inexplicably hangs around the site. Well, I assume they're tourists; they cannot be dedicated paleontology buffs, as Grant gets into argument with a child unimpressed by the raptor and terrifies him into respecting a creature that went extinct 71 millions years ago. It's an absurd scene, serving to introduce these characters via their half-written traits that substitute for actual humanity: Alan hates kids and computers, Ellie has the smarts to match him but also serves as the mediator between Grant and the rest of humanity. Then, a Scottish version of a leprechaun arrives announcing himself as Mr. Hammond (Richard Attenborough), the beneficiary of Grant's dig. Hammond exudes "kooky eccentric billionaire," and he insists the two come out to a theme park he's devising. Along the way, they meet Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), a mathematician who appears to have taken fashion cues from Miles Davis' '80s wardrobe.

But once they arrive on the Latin American island and a jeep pulls into a clearing, for one brief moment the turgid anti-momentum of the film's plot setup gives way to one of the most magical moments of Spielberg's canon, one that takes me right back to a childhood of obsessing over dinosaurs and the sense of complete wonder and awe this movie instilled in me at age 5. That brilliantly laid out sequence of the dinosaurs revealed first through gentle but forceful surround sound whoomps, then the facial reactions of stunned characters and finally the glorious shot of a brachiosaurus as the music swells. In that instant, nothing else matters, and one sympathizes with Grant going weak at the knees.

More than any modern director, Spielberg understands the power of cinema as spectacle. Spectacle does not automatically connote simplicity, and the power to please millions should not be written off as proof of hackdom. Just because Jay Leno builds his audience by diluting his once caustic brand of verbal peroxide with water doesn't mean everyone who become a household name sold his soul. Look at how perfectly Spielberg reaches for the audience's collective jaw and gently pulls it down; this movie began with suspense and fear, gave way to stiff narrative exercises, and then it morphed into this?

The director finds his groove here, using the next scenes, all of which build as much plot as the scenes leading to the arrival at Isla Nublar yet feel lighter, more engaging. A dated but fun segment answering the questions prompted by the sight of a dinosaur walking around -- chief of which being, "How the hell did this happen?!" -- and also tempers the fantastical element of the preceding reveal with genuinely clever pseudo-science from novelist Michael Crichton. Though his explanation is not only impossible but far-fetched even if one were to accept some degree of plausibility, the idea that scientists could get the DNA needed to clone dinosaurs from the drunken blood preserved in fossilized mosquitoes beats the hell out of any previous reason given in dino films for the presence of terrible lizards.

Crichton's setup also allows for explorations of the morality of genetic engineering in a time where scientific breakthroughs made work in the field possible -- two years after Jurassic Park, scientists cloned Dolly the sheep. Hammond expects to be worshiped by his assembled experts, but instead they all express reservations. Malcolm, who specializes in chaos theory, outright lambastes the park and notes that all the genetic safeguards do not guarantee perfection and cryptically forewarns, "Life finds a way." Grant and Sattler note the variables and unseen dangers as well, but they agree to go on a tour of the place. By this point, however, Spielberg has subtly meshed the excitement of the film's trademark scene with the earlier suspense, gracefully intertwining curiosity and terror as the genetic talk deepens.

The tour itself epitomizes the inability to manufacture life to be entertainment. The scientists might be controlling breeding by restricting gender to female, they might even orchestrate a fail-safe protein deficiency in case a creature gets off the island, but they can't make the dinosaurs show up at the edge of the fence in each paddock waiting to dazzle the audience, which by now includes Hammond's tween grandkids, the bookish, dino-loving Tim (Joseph Mazzello) and the hacker tomboy Alex (Ariana Richards). The group does not see the first dinosaur, nor the second. When they all finally come across one, it's a sick triceratops that can only be seen when Ellie spots it and gets out of the automated electric car and everyone follows suit.

Meanwhile, the head programmer of the park's advanced computer system prepares to betray his boss. Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight) sits at his computer bank surrounded by food wrappers and cola cans, his keyboard likely sticky with grease. Swimming in debt despite being a key staff of the park, Nedry blames Hammond for not paying him even more and decides to sell embryos to a rival genetic engineering firm. If life can be manufactured, life has a price. Not only does cloning raise moral issues of playing God, it turns life into a commodity, a copyright other businesses try to steal.

Looking to cover his tracks, Nedry hacks his own system to shut down all the security features of the park so he can escape. In the process, however, he turns off all the electric fences, letting the dinosaurs get out. At last, the plot thickens, though it still has the viscosity hot sauce. For the rest of the movie, the humans run, hide and run some more from unleashed dinosaurs, either trembling at the onslaught of a T-Rex or waiting for an ambush by the smaller but smarter raptors.

Both predators offer more potential for Spielberg's thriller. The T-Rex, gargantuan, deafening and capable of crushing a whole man in one bite, makes even the massive shark seem simple in comparison. The director announces it by the motif of a soft thud deep in the background and a quiver of water in a puddle or glass, the calm before the storm. Whenever that massive head juts into view, the panic overwhelms. The velocirpators work in an opposite fashion. There is no warning, no trick to contain them. The T-Rex gives itself enough time to let its victims froth in terror; the raptor just strikes. Small, fast and resourceful, the raptors come out to play whenever a human might find itself in an area where it need not fear the tyrannosaur, ensuring that no place in the park is truly safe.

The "baddie" dinosaurs, like the rest of the creatures, are the collective result of four effects masters working in tandem: Stan Winston with his animatronics, Phil Tippet's go-motion, supervisor Michael Lantieri and digital animator Dennis Muren. Though one can tell when a puppet is being used and when the computer animation is on-screen (typically the animatronics are used for close-ups and direct contact with characters while the CGI dinos appear in long shot), the effects work borders on the seamless. Jurassic Park, a film about the potential side effects of technological growth, ironically set off a technical revolution in the cinema, introducing a breakthrough in storytelling potential that almost immediately morphed into a way to make big, silly effects on the cheap. How many movies today survive solely on CGI that dazzles an audience instead of working fluidly in a story? Why, the same is true of Jurassic Park itself.

In fairness, the film does have some clever writing. In smoothing out Crichton's technical writing and heavy plot, David Koepp made the wise decision to alter the characterization of Hammond, who in the novel was a conniving old huckster who abandoned pharmaceutical research for genetic engineering because, despite the gouging policies of Big Pharm, he could not charged as he pleased for medicine. The novel's Hammond would agree with the lawyer here (weakened into a thin stereotype for the movie) that he could charge tens of thousands for a single ticket. Koepp helps drive the point about the dangers of genetic engineering by casting Hammond as a kindly old benefactor who wants, Walt Disney-style, to see smiles on the faces of all the world's children. However, like Disney, Hammond has a hard ambition that cannot be hidden, not even behind that avuncular face, and he allows himself to overlook tiny flaws until they escalate into massive problems.

Elsewhere, however, the characters thin, from the lawyer to Alan, who loved children in the book because of their love of dinosaurs but hates them here so he can fit into Spielberg's running theme of emotionally distant father figures and to set up the ostensibly emotional plot of Grant learning to care for Hammond's grandchildren out in the park. Perhaps if Neill committed, he could make the character work, but he appears to have recognized that the dinosaurs would be the main attraction and coasts through the movie with his Indiana Jones-knockoff hat (and profession, come to think of it) while Laura Dern makes for the world's unlikeliest scream queen as she shrieks and swears in terror for the whole of her time on the island. She has a scene late in the film with Hammond in which she must deliver one of the most eye-rolling "HERE IS THE MESSAGE" speeches ever, and she over-emotes so blatantly it's hard not to laugh when she unhelpfully adds, "People are dying out there!" Only Goldblum is remotely animated, but he spends so much time dancing around tossing out quips that he only manages to cover up for the fact that Malcolm has no actual character.

There's also the issue of some sloppy editing. When the guests get out to see the triceratops, it's barely cloudy outside. After about an hour, a hurricane has blown in and lightning arcs the sky. Not 20 minutes later, it's pitch-black and raining in monsoon quantities, just so Nedry's escape can be all the more confusing and doomed. Alan shoots at raptors with a shotgun, but the glass he shoots shows bullet holes, not shot damage. The clearest example is, of course, the tyrannosaur paddock, which is ground level at the start and suddenly a 30-ft. gulf when the T-Rex busts out and shoves a car into its pen. Everything exists for maximum entertainment, but the lack of even basic continuity at times shows an amateurism that Spielberg never previously allowed in his immaculate work.

I will forgive a film thin characters and predictable plotting if it is told well visually -- it is a visual medium, after all. But Spielberg seems to have dialed back his style to make the computer animation easier for his staff as they felt their way around their own innovation, and Jurassic Park suffers most not from its characters but from Spielberg letting off the gas. Jaws worked so well as a thriller because the director was in control of everything. Here, he must rely on others to put stuff into his frame after he shoots, and he appears out of his element. Of course, he was charting new territory and the degree to which he incorporated CGI meant he had to be the one to brave these unknown waters, but there is an unease with digital animation in this film that Spielberg would only later overcome.

And yet, the film does achieve that maximum entertainment. Jurassic Park may sacrifice character, coherence, even style to grab the audience, but I cannot deny I still thrill at that brachiosaur, still sit on edge when Dern goes into that raptor-ridden bunker and still feel uplifted by John Williams' main theme, one of his finest compositions. Even so, like Hook, Jurassic Park can no longer make me ignore glaring issues for the sake of nostalgia. Its conservatism is particularly tedious: the film emphasizes the need for a nuclear family through Grant's storyline with the kids (who, frankly, are so annoying I wouldn't mind if they made toothpicks for the T-Rex), and it makes a justifiable yet overbearing critique of the unchecked progress of science. Hell, it even has a minor go at electric cars for being silly and reliant upon outside factors that limit our freedom.

Looking back, it seems the perfect blockbuster for the Clinton era, an attempt to add heart back to the blockbuster after the soulless '80s (even Spielberg used the decade to make the largely self-serving Indiana Jones films), but that do-good liberalism ties to old-school conservative values. In that sense, one must credit Universal president Sid Sheinberg insisted Spielberg make this film before Schindler's List: Spielberg, the ultimate Hollywood liberal, had to cleanse his palette with this film before moving totally into the humanism of his next feature. Taken with Schindler's List, Jurassic Park cements the director's domination of all aspects of mainstream American cinema, and for all the film's flaws, it still shows a man capable of pleasing hundreds of millions with the ease of flicking a light switch. Nostalgia be damned: when the film clicks, it transcends its weaknesses, even if but for one blessed instant. Sometimes, that's all it takes.

Carpenter's Tools: In the Mouth of Madness

As I have said repeatedly in my trek through John Carpenter's filmography, the most entertaining and rewarding aspect of his filmmaking is his simplicity. In a time when every blockbuster is artificially inflated to 150 minutes without fail in order to fleetingly justify high ticket prices to complaining consumers, Carpenter's films recall a time when people actually accepted quality over quantity, finding a taut 90 minutes preferable to suffering through repetitive sequences and limp humor simply to get a better money:time ratio. (Heck, even comedies suffer from bloat; in the unofficial and unnecessary battle of the wheel-spinning slacker gurus, I will always side with Kevin Smith over Judd Apatow because Smith knows that brevity is the soul of wit.) Carpenter's films are direct, on-the-nose and predictable and they are often better for it.

That's what makes the unabashedly Lovecraftian In the Mouth of Madness such an anomaly in the director's canon, and such a delight. Here is a film that folds back on itself, that distorts perspective and, finally, pulls the rug out from under us before it, like its protagonist, cackles at itself. In true Lovecraftian fashion, it begins in a mental asylum, as its newest inhabitant, P.I. John Trent (Sam Neill), recounts the tale of what led him to his new abode. The first clues pointing to the film's cheeky nature come in a wonderfully pulpy tracking shot across cells of asylum and a quasi-self-reflexive spin of the Carpenters' "We've Only Just Begun" as Neill, who'd worked on the director's previous film, sighs "not the Carpenters."

What follows is a delicious slice of metafiction, made all the more gleefully entertaining as filtered through Carpenter's matter-of-fact approach. Trent investigates the disappearance of one Sutter Crane, a massively popular horror writer who's become the most widely read author of the 20th century, according to his publishers. Before he meets them, Trent fields an attack from an ax-wielding madman who calmly asks the investigator, "Do you read Sutter Crane?" before lunging for him. Crane's editor, Linda Styles (Julie Carmen), informs Trent that the man was Crane's agent. Within minutes, Trent manages to find clues in the book covers of Crane's novels that form a map of New Hampshire pointing to a location of his fictional setting Hobb's End (a nod to Stephen King and his fondness for fictional hamlets in Maine), and he and Styles head out to find the author.

Rapidly, things go awry. They cannot find Hobb's End because it doesn't exist, but Linda suffers a terrifying drive at night as John sleeps, at first passing by the same cyclist before accidentally striking him, driving on what appears to be the top of a storm cloud before somehow winding up in broad daylight in the town of Hobb's End. Naturally, Trent stirs only at the end and compliments Linda for finding the place.

From the start, everything in Hobb's End seems off, from the jittery old lady running the desk of a hotel (her name, Mrs. Pickman, a reference to Lovecraft's story "Pickman's Model," which somewhat informs the structure of this story) to a looming, black, Russian cathedral that we learn houses Crane. Linda begins to spot real-life corollaries between Crane's novels and events occurring in the town, and soon the two spot hideously mutated creatures roaming about causing violence. Crane shows Linda the manuscript for his new book, the titular, In the Mouth of Madness, as she sees both events that have already happened and events that will come to pass. In the process, she too becomes a monster.

Carpenter's cheek can be seen all over the place in the film, as Trent slowly realizes that everyone in the town, including himself, is a character written by Crane. A man in a bar kills himself in front of John, saying "I have to. He wrote me this way." This semi-religious speech is hinted at earlier when news briefs discuss the frenzy over Crane's books and the violence that erupts at bookstores when operators cannot meet the demands of his incensed fanbase and a pundit asks "When does fiction become religion?" I am reminded of the cases in the late-'80s and early-'90s when parents and distraction-hungry politicians railed against heavy metal for driving young fans to lives of debauchery and suicide, ignoring both the impact of Reagan's economic plan on the deification of fast, loose living involving a lot of spent cash and the unanswered question, "What band wants to kill its audience?" In Carpenter's metafilm, he parlays the hysteria over music into pulp fiction with a straight face that makes the whole gag that much funnier. Crane places something in his writing that causes hallucinations and paranoia in people's minds, leading them to tear humanity apart so that Crane might turn over the planet to a race of monsters he envisioned who worship him as a god. When the agent listening to Trent's story in the framing device asks Trent how Crane expects to control the world when so many don't read, John smiles and replies, "They're making a movie."

And so, the film ends with Trent, having walked out of the ransacked asylum and its massacred inhabitants and found his face on a movie billboard advertising the film we've been watching the whole time. As he sits in a vacant theater watching his own life played back to him, he begins to laugh maniacally. Is he insane? Is the entire film set inside Crane's novel and Trent is indeed the protagonist? Or is it all true, that Trent has been forced into bringing about the apocalypse and monsters are currently overrunning the humans that didn't already kill each other? John just laughs harder at the possibilities, a desperate final act to keep the darkness at bay for just a few more seconds.

Right behind him is Carpenter, laughing just as hard at his own demons. Carpenter had once again returned to horror after an attempt to branch out into another genre met with critical and commercial indifference, and the same fate would befall this feature. People were moving beyond Carpenter, even though most action/horror cinema of the '90s was a large step down from the quality of his best work, and Madness simply got lost in the shuffle. Yet Cahiers du Cinéma would place In the Mouth of Madness on their best of the year list, recognizing it as a top-notch oddity in the director's work that nevertheless displayed all his usual, blunt charm. For my money, it's Carpenter's finest since The Thing, and one of his key works.

Carpenter's Tools: Memoirs of an Invisible Man

When I say that John Carpenter is a director who does not try too hard, I mean that as a compliment. He manages an accomplished and tightly composed visual style without indulging himself, and he scripts his films with the barest of exposition. Hell, he's so taut he typically only has time for one or two good performances per film. When he quit the studio system for a time in the late '80s, you could hardly tell these lower budget films apart from the seminal cult work he made at the start of the decade.

However, you can see a massive difference in Carpenter's 1992 return to a major studio (Warner Bros): Memoirs of an Invisible Man. Given $40 million, almost twice the highest amount he'd previously enjoyed for a project, Carpenter could take advantages of breakthroughs in digital animation, which was so cheaply rendered in his other films that it looked outdated even compared to contemporaneous releases. With this extreme (for Carpenter) cash pile, the director and his effects team crafted one of the most impressive uses of digital animation in the early '90s, not as innovative or overwhelming as the work on James Cameron's Terminator 2 but nearly as clever.

Why, then, was the film such a big failure at the box office, halting Carpenter's momentum as he broke back into the system before he truly got started? Perhaps the casting of Chevy Chase and foreknowledge of the director's penchant for goofy, light satire doomed it, because it's important to note that Memoirs is not a comedy. Oh, it gets some laughs here and there, both from the script and Carpenter's sight gags, but Dana Olsen and William Goldman's screenplay is clearly meant to be a straightforward thriller built around the effects.

As such, it succeeds admirably. Chase plays Nick Halloway, a businessman without surviving family, a partner, many friends or even a committed work ethic. He simply is, until, after a particularly hard drinking session with a beautiful friend of a friend (Daryl Hannah), he passes out at the office as an experiment in one of its labs goes horribly awry. He wakes to find the building seemingly on the edge of collapse, missing huge chunks in the structure as if a bomb went off. Yet the walls are intact, merely invisible in places, along with our hapless protagonist.

Before any potentially comic situation arises, special agents arrive on the scene, headed by the amoral David Jenkins (Sam Neill, deliciously wicked without overplaying it). Jenkins and the rest of the response crew realize that a person has been affected when they spot a hat moving back and forth and screaming for help.

Jenkins sees the immense potential of Halloway as A) the best CIA agent the world has ever (not) seen or B) a ticket to big money for another country to take advantage of Nick's possibilities. Nick overhears David's plan and manages to escape and heads out on the lam, pursued by a team of government agents operating without clearance from Langley so Jenkins can catch his prize. Carpenter manages the chase with the same skill he displayed in thrillers like Escape from New York, flagging for an odd bit of comic relief that actually serves more to examine Nick's state of mind than to wreak repetitive gags based on the premise.

Chase has never been so reserved, and as a comic actor he always excelled by projecting an aura of "I don't give a damn if you like me or not" swagger. Basing his career on this style of acting allows him to slip into the drama of the story with ease. Nothing about the story is particularly deep, but Chase almost makes you care when he off-handedly mentions in the voiceover how he'd always dreamed of being invisible as a shy kid; indeed, Jenkins looks over his profile detailing his lack of emotional connections to anyone or anything, and he remarks "He was invisible before he was invisible."

Setting aside such moments, as well as a largely unnecessary romantic subplot between Hannah and Chase that is not grating but also not relevant in any way other than to give Halloway his first real emotional tether to the world, Memoirs of an Invisible Man caters entirely to its Hawksian take on a Hitchcock wrong man thriller. It moves so quickly that it has no time for Carpenter's usual satire: vague references are made to Jenkins' involvement in a notorious operation in Iran, but such brief references are straight-faced, not peevish.

But let's go back to those effects. The opening shot, of Nick setting up a video camera to tape his titular memoirs, sets the stage for what's to come. To prove that he's not simply recording a voiceover for a shot of an empty chair, Nick unwraps a piece of bubble gum and chews it, the perfect cube of gum squishing and twisting around in the air before the outline of a tongue stretches it out and blows a bubble. It's such a simple thing, yet so striking (certainly for its time period), and it shows what might have been the start of a brilliant new phase of a career for the director of a handful of the best low-budget genre pictures of all time. Shots of Nick drinking an the liquid sloshing around where his stomach should be recall a bit of Cameron's work on The Abyss, though I did find myself wondering why Nick couldn't eat solid foods to avoid the ungainly sight of meals digesting when the average human carries several pounds of undigested meat in his intestines. I suppose anything that was in him at the time of the accident was made invisible with the rest of him, and now I find myself wondering if his first few trips to the bathroom afterward resulted in invisible waste, but let us not dwell on such matters.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man is, like most of Carpenter's films, far from a masterpiece, but it's a terrific genre picture with enough twists to liven up the rigidity of the invisible man conceit. Hannah is a dynamic actress, too dynamic for a role as underwritten as Alice's, but Sam Neill is the best human villain in a Carpenter film since Isaac Hayes nearly stole the show in Escape from New York. Plus, it's interesting to see more comically oriented actors like Chase and Michael McKean of Spinal Tap fame (in a small role) either playing their laughs as semi-sophisticated -- a premature ejaculation gag involving McKean a notable exception -- and it's a shame the film tanked and earned such lousy reviews for Chase (just before his chat show came and went), who ran for cover to mugging goofiness and never looked back, only recently finding a good outlet for it on the show Community. It also must have stuck in Carpenter's craw something fierce, having won back some fans with They Live after Big Trouble in Little China underperformed and Prince of Darkness failed to make a splash, only to lose them once more here. But for those, like me, who assumed that the '90s were nothing but excruciating failure for the director, Memoirs is a nice riposte, not in the first tier of Carpenter's corpus but a surprisingly solid companion for a double-header with a good Hitchcock chaser.