Pros:
1. Kane Hodder as Jason is a match made in heaven. Brings tons of character and visceral energy to the role in a way that elevates the (lack of?) material he's given.
2. John Carl Buechler as director/effects guy. With the uncut gore scenes reinserted (courtesy of fan ingenuity and initiative), we get a clearer sense of how extreme Buechler intended to go with the violence. The movie's overall vibe is also appropriately dark: the supporting characters are entertainingly cruel, the kills all take place in the woods at night (as it should be), and Kane Hodder's stunt coordination gives everything an added layer of brutality.
Cons:
1. Too many characters. The delicate balance between body count and character development is something every slasher movie has to negotiate differently, and The New Blood simply introduces more un(der)developed side characters than the story can handle. Even the leads, Lar Park-Lincoln as psychic girl Tina and Terry Kiser as her psychiatrist, aren't given anything terribly interesting to do.
2. Lack of cleverness. Even before the censors forced Buechler & co. to remove all of the gore shots, there is a sense that the filmmakers were beginning to write themselves into a corner when it comes to the kill scenes. Except for the sleeping bag scene (which Jason X would eventually redo and improve upon), the kills in The New Blood tend to riff on things we've already seen: skull-crushings, defenestrations, popping out of the water, and (of course) a lot of stabbing. Considering that there is a) a surprise birthday theme introduced early on, and b) a Final Girl with telekinetic powers, The New Blood feels like a lot of missed opportunities for shenanigans.
Reviews
2 Reviews
The Big Heat
(1953)
The cruelest (and best) of film noir
22 April 2014
Warning: Spoilers
The Big Heat is a prime contender for the cruelest and most brutal of all film noirs, which is saying quite a lot. At the same time, a big part of why that may be so is that The Big Heat is in many ways hardly a film noir at all. All of the great canonical film noirs, including Otto Preminger's Laura, Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity and Ace in the Hole, Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past, and Alexander Mackendrick's The Sweet Smell of Success, tend to be populated by characters with little trace of goodness left in them; they are all doomed, fated to their inevitably bitter ends from the outset. What makes The Big Heat so powerful and disturbing—and, ultimately, so unlike most film noirs—is that it has, at its heart, many genuinely good people.
Fritz Lang, the brilliant German director who had already cemented his place in cinematic history with monumental films like Metropolis, Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler, and M, creates in The Big Heat a film whose strength lies in defying expectations of plot, genre, and characterization. Its opening, for instance, is not a far cry from the usual hard-boiled detective formula. Police Sergeant Bannion (Glenn Ford) is assigned to investigate the suicide of a high-ranking fellow officer, which leads him to uncover a trail of corruption and licentiousness and, in turn, puts him into deep trouble with the local mob syndicate, headed by Mike Legana (Alex Scourby) and the psychopathic Vince Stone (a young Lee Marvin).
Lang manages to transcend these cut-and-dry foundations, however, by affording his protagonist a greater depth than one usually finds in a hard-boiled detective hero. The typical hard-boiled detective is unshakeable, wisecracking and ethically-ambiguous, but generally one-note: coolness is all they have going for them. Glenn Ford's character, by contrast, is a family man and, ultimately, a tragic figure. Whereas the characters in other film noirs are often so uniformly reprehensible that any misfortunes that befall them seem almost warranted, the juxtaposition between Bannion's tough policeman persona and his fatherly sensitivity and protectiveness—first with his daughter and later with Stone's abused girlfriend Debbie (Gloria Grahame)—makes the character's plights and perils all the more involving. You see, Bannion is not just a smart-talking male power fantasy, but a decent, honest man who is merely driven to brutality by tragic circumstances.
Perhaps the reason that The Big Heat seems so sadistically violent, then, is that the audience is given genuine reason to sympathize with those who are subjected to it. Again, this is where Lang's genius really comes into play. Anyone who has seen enough Hollywood movies would naturally expect that after Bannion carries his unconscious wife (played by Marlon Brando's older sister, Jocelyn Brando) off-screen after she has been wounded in a car-bombing intended for him, there would be a scene in which we see her safely recovering in a hospital bed and Bannion angrily promising her that he will find out who was responsible for the attack. But no: in the next scene, we find out that she dies. On top of that, Lang mercilessly obliterates the quaint, idyllic domesticity of the Bannion household in earlier scenes with a scene in which Bannion bitterly packs up and moves out of the old family home, now cold and empty. It's truly heartbreaking, and it makes Bannion's subsequent trials all the more compelling and, dare I say, poignant. The same goes for the infamous scene in which Lee Marvin scalds Gloria Grahame's face with a pot of boiling coffee. The scene is especially cringe-inducing and sadistic because the audience realizes that she is not just some vain, self-obsessed gangster moll (which, in a more conventional film noir, would make the cruel attack seem like poetic justice), but merely an unlucky, good-natured girl who got caught up with the wrong kind of guys.
The rest of The Big Heat then works like the best of revenge tragedies, in which even more cruelty and violent retribution is enacted as form of catharsis. The one thing that struck me the most about the action in this film is just how much more forceful and yet satisfying it seemed. Just like any hard-boiled hero, Bannion goes around and punches the lights out of a lot of henchmen throughout the film. Under Lang's direction, though, the punching in The Big Heat doesn't have the stagey and almost slapstick-like physics of other cinematic punches, with the bad guys awkwardly stumbling backwards or flipping over tables. Instead, when Bannion punches somebody, they practically fly across the room, knocking everything down in their path. That Lang often quick-cuts or whips the camera around in tandem with the physical blows gives an even greater illusion of weight to the action. Furthermore, not only does Bannion punch a lot of people, but he strangles quite a few people too, including one of the female antagonists. It is here that I must give due credit to Glenn Ford for his performance here: he is not just good; he's scary good. Again, the fact that Ford is capable of showing Bannion as both a loving family man and a ruthless enforcer makes things all the more chilling.
It's almost unbelievable that a film as relentless, audacious, and absorbing as Lang's The Big Heat could have been made in the context of the Hollywood studio system under the notoriously restrictive Production Code. Then again, like many of the best films from this era, maybe it's precisely *because* of the constraints of the period that the film is so effective: denied the ability to portray realistic violence or sexual content—the kind that is all but commonplace in today's films—, a filmmaker like Lang would have had to rely on the subtle power of suggestion and of well-honed characterization to generate emotional impact. That Lang was still able to make it all work so astoundingly well is surely a testament to both his and the film's undeniable greatness.
Fritz Lang, the brilliant German director who had already cemented his place in cinematic history with monumental films like Metropolis, Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler, and M, creates in The Big Heat a film whose strength lies in defying expectations of plot, genre, and characterization. Its opening, for instance, is not a far cry from the usual hard-boiled detective formula. Police Sergeant Bannion (Glenn Ford) is assigned to investigate the suicide of a high-ranking fellow officer, which leads him to uncover a trail of corruption and licentiousness and, in turn, puts him into deep trouble with the local mob syndicate, headed by Mike Legana (Alex Scourby) and the psychopathic Vince Stone (a young Lee Marvin).
Lang manages to transcend these cut-and-dry foundations, however, by affording his protagonist a greater depth than one usually finds in a hard-boiled detective hero. The typical hard-boiled detective is unshakeable, wisecracking and ethically-ambiguous, but generally one-note: coolness is all they have going for them. Glenn Ford's character, by contrast, is a family man and, ultimately, a tragic figure. Whereas the characters in other film noirs are often so uniformly reprehensible that any misfortunes that befall them seem almost warranted, the juxtaposition between Bannion's tough policeman persona and his fatherly sensitivity and protectiveness—first with his daughter and later with Stone's abused girlfriend Debbie (Gloria Grahame)—makes the character's plights and perils all the more involving. You see, Bannion is not just a smart-talking male power fantasy, but a decent, honest man who is merely driven to brutality by tragic circumstances.
Perhaps the reason that The Big Heat seems so sadistically violent, then, is that the audience is given genuine reason to sympathize with those who are subjected to it. Again, this is where Lang's genius really comes into play. Anyone who has seen enough Hollywood movies would naturally expect that after Bannion carries his unconscious wife (played by Marlon Brando's older sister, Jocelyn Brando) off-screen after she has been wounded in a car-bombing intended for him, there would be a scene in which we see her safely recovering in a hospital bed and Bannion angrily promising her that he will find out who was responsible for the attack. But no: in the next scene, we find out that she dies. On top of that, Lang mercilessly obliterates the quaint, idyllic domesticity of the Bannion household in earlier scenes with a scene in which Bannion bitterly packs up and moves out of the old family home, now cold and empty. It's truly heartbreaking, and it makes Bannion's subsequent trials all the more compelling and, dare I say, poignant. The same goes for the infamous scene in which Lee Marvin scalds Gloria Grahame's face with a pot of boiling coffee. The scene is especially cringe-inducing and sadistic because the audience realizes that she is not just some vain, self-obsessed gangster moll (which, in a more conventional film noir, would make the cruel attack seem like poetic justice), but merely an unlucky, good-natured girl who got caught up with the wrong kind of guys.
The rest of The Big Heat then works like the best of revenge tragedies, in which even more cruelty and violent retribution is enacted as form of catharsis. The one thing that struck me the most about the action in this film is just how much more forceful and yet satisfying it seemed. Just like any hard-boiled hero, Bannion goes around and punches the lights out of a lot of henchmen throughout the film. Under Lang's direction, though, the punching in The Big Heat doesn't have the stagey and almost slapstick-like physics of other cinematic punches, with the bad guys awkwardly stumbling backwards or flipping over tables. Instead, when Bannion punches somebody, they practically fly across the room, knocking everything down in their path. That Lang often quick-cuts or whips the camera around in tandem with the physical blows gives an even greater illusion of weight to the action. Furthermore, not only does Bannion punch a lot of people, but he strangles quite a few people too, including one of the female antagonists. It is here that I must give due credit to Glenn Ford for his performance here: he is not just good; he's scary good. Again, the fact that Ford is capable of showing Bannion as both a loving family man and a ruthless enforcer makes things all the more chilling.
It's almost unbelievable that a film as relentless, audacious, and absorbing as Lang's The Big Heat could have been made in the context of the Hollywood studio system under the notoriously restrictive Production Code. Then again, like many of the best films from this era, maybe it's precisely *because* of the constraints of the period that the film is so effective: denied the ability to portray realistic violence or sexual content—the kind that is all but commonplace in today's films—, a filmmaker like Lang would have had to rely on the subtle power of suggestion and of well-honed characterization to generate emotional impact. That Lang was still able to make it all work so astoundingly well is surely a testament to both his and the film's undeniable greatness.
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