A Nightmare on Shutter Island

Let me make it clear that I'm a big, fat, salivating fan and admirer of Martin Scorsese, the director who has given the world many classics such as The King of Comedy, Goodfellas, Casino, The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun, Mean Streets, The Departed, and the current Shutter Island. I have no personal axe to grind against Marty and his towering talents. His place in cinematic history is untouchable.

That said, I didn't much like Shutter Island.

There are certain cinematic tropes that I have grown to despise. Each year, these rotten, tired devices from lazy minds annoy me a little bit more. Probably because each year I'm living longer with them and they're (unfairly) going to outlive me.

One of my pet cinematic hates is dream sequences. I don't mind material that is dream-like, but I want to kick a skull when a scene is building to a head and suddenly, viola!, a character snaps awake or sits up in their bed looking frazzled and fried. We then know that we've been watching the character's dream. We've been conned.

Well, I say Fuck your stupid dream sequences, they suck elephant dick! The very idea of a dream sequence is sucky to me. Not only does it permit the filmmaker to write checks they can't cash, but it gives marketers an opportunity to shove irrelevant scenes into a trailer that really have nothing to do with the meat of the movie they're selling. It makes for sloppy writing, too, because writers chuck stuff into the mix that they couldn't logically include in the central narrative. That's what bothers me most. Like I said, I'm all for dream-like, bizarre, crazy imagery, but why not come up with an original story that can logically incorporate this imagery. Or sell us a world where grotesque, terrifying events are part of the furniture. If it can't be logically incorporated into the world of your script, perhaps IT DOESN'T BELONG IN THE FUCKING MOVIE.

I guess I was never cut out for Shutter Island, or stories of its ilk; it's masturbation material for dream sequence lovers everywhere, and if you're one of those, you'll spill a gallon of spunk beating off to what Scorsese does with uncommon relish here. If you haven't seen the movie yet, stop reading right now because I'm going to allude to content that could be deemed spoiler-ish.

Film opens with Leonardo Di Caprio and Mark Ruffalo on a boat on a misty bay. Very picturesque. Moody. Dream-like. Shutter Island, a prison for loonies, emerges from the soup. Di Caprio and his partner have arrived to investigate the disappearance of a prisoner. We know something strange is afoot because everybody on the island is either too nice or too evasive. The body of the movie involves the investigation. Although the premise is not lacking for drama, no muscle is exercised resisting a plethora of dream sequences and dreams within dreams within dreams. Di Caprio snaps awake often, bolts upright, and is left in a sweat by a shitload of dream sequences before the film hits its lengthy run time.

In fairness, Di Caprio's dreams and mental wanderings have much to do with the film's "twist", but I didn't care for it one bit. Nothing felt particularly original or compelling, either. I'd seen it all before without dreams. What this movie provoked in me was a strong desire to see a different movie.

Not surprisingly, the film's technical accomplishments are monumental, but so they should be when you're spending close to a hundred million dollars. The performances are strong, the island setting is potent with mood and texture, and the music, a compilation of many movie scores assembled with the assistance of Robbie Robertson, is a thing of beauty. Unfortunately, the film made me yearn for a story in which characters face assorted demons in a state of wakefulness. In dream sequences, you can throw in any old crap and justify its existence. It is the very ease in which this can be done that bothers me most. When a character snaps out of a dream, I never believe that the dream was so vivid it remained with them. For the most part, dreams are incoherent and mostly forgotten after we've emerged from them. I simply don't buy the whole idea. Hollywood's representation of dream states has us much credibility as how it depicts what one sees through a pair of binoculars.

Although I liked Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street, I fancied the 'Elm Street' part far more than the 'Nightmare'. I liked the opening scene where Freddy sharpens his tools and gets ready to take revenge. When I learned that he'd do it in dreams, my hopes scattered like dried leaves, and I was forced to suffer one incoherent set piece after another. I wanted to see the real Freddy butchering the real parents who burned him. I didn't believe a moment of him doing it in dreams. I guess I prefer waking nightmares.

Shutter Island's Leonardo Di Caprio is living a nightmare, but it's not a nightmare that excited me.

Just a personal opinion based on my own likes, dislikes, and personal preferences, of course. But isn't one's reaction to every movie just that?

First Houses of Joy

I lived in Detroit for several years and loved it; I've never been able to understand the negativity about the town. For a horror fan, it was a paradise.

It snows like hell in Detroit, especially in January. It was the first time I heard the expression "windchill factor". When you pump gas, you experience it firsthand.

As a new arrival, I was warned to steer clear of the drive-ins in Winter because of the snow and sleet. "It's best to wait until March or April," they'd say.

Did these people know who they were talking to?

I hadn't seen either film at the time. I was eighteen. When this ad mat appeared in the "Detroit News", I was shaking with excitement.

Last House on the Left had been banned in Australia for years. It was still banned three or four years ago. It had a rep. A great rep. That was all I needed.

I knew nothing about The House By The Lake because it didn't occur to me -- at the time -- that the film was called Death Weekend in the UK and Australia. I had read a review of Death Weekend in an issue of "Films and Filming", an excellent British periodical from the publishers of "Books and Bookmen". There had been a dynamite still of a cop being dragged behind a moving car. It was an image that never left me. Six years later, I'd take it for inspiration, and expand it into a modest feature of my own... Enough said.

The snow didn't stop falling all Friday. It had dug itself in for the weekend. My partner at the time warned me that driving on the slippery roads, in falling snow, was a recipe for disaster, especially for an Australian who'd only had his license for under a year and whose experience with snow was limited to writing on Xmas cards. So I nodded, acknowledging her concern, kissed her goodbye, and made a bee-line for the front door.

I was living in Mount Clemens, a suburb of Detroit that was approximately ten miles from the Gratiot Drive-In (it took its name from its street address).

I took my time, drove slowly, and ran the car heater at full bore. I was one of a chosen few who'd taken to the roads that snowy Friday night. The wipers were deflecting the falling flakes reasaonbly efficiently, but the hot air was drying out my eyes something fierce. I squinted to peer through the smudged windscreen. Every now and then, sets of bright, yellow eyes would sweep past me.

The Gratiot Drive-In emerged from a flurry. Its neon sign beckoned me in the right direction. I lowered the heat and lurched towards the ticket box. The driveway was a shagpile of mud. It was 730, but there were no other cars. I definitely had the right drive-in, though. Next to the ticket seller was a small, enticing poster for Last House. No amount of snow could dampen my enthusiasm.

When I paid my five bucks, I was handed a little square box that turned out to be a portable, in-car heater; they certainly didn't need those back in Australia. A portable air conditioner might have been nice now and then, though. I took this odd, unnecessary contraption off the ticket seller and drove on through the floating muck.

I parked dead center between the screen and the projection booth. I had my pick of spots. I wound down the window and reached out into the freezer to grab the speaker. Jesus, it was Arctic out there! I hung the metal speaker from the window and wound it up tight -- as tight as I could, anyway. That's when I noticed the gap. That gap had always been there, of course, but now it much more obvious and much more troubling. There was an insistent, chilly breeze blowing through that gap onto the side of my face. Suddenly I was very grateful for my unnecessary, in-car heater.

I watched Last House for the first time through falling snow, blunt wipers that left snail trails, and frequent blooms of condensation. Despite all that, and despite the buzz of the in-car, complimentary people warmer, I loved it. Experiencing Wes Craven's rough-edged cult classic for the first time left an indelible impression on my young mind. David Hess's "Krug" was just the sort of villain I warmed to and I couldn't take my eyes off him. When he commanded one of the kidnapped girls to "Piss your pants!", I felt like a very free man in America. I couldn't watch stuff like this back in Australia. Nobody could at the time. I felt lucky to be able to see this mighty movie at a drive-in. One of Detroit's finest drive-ins.

When I began work for Orion Pictures several months later, I would learn that the Gratiot and the Bel Air, an impressive multi-screen "ozoner", were the local industry's biggest outdoor earners.

The House By The Lake, which is a far more lyrical title than Death Weekend, became one of my all-time favorite movies that night, and it still is.

William Fruet's beautifully made revenge shocker, cut from the same cloth as Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and Boorman's Deliverance (remade almost literally by Fruet later on as Trapped aka Baker County USA), and sewn together with fabric borrowed from Wes, was a revelation. In addition to the brutal action and great location photography of rural Canada, the film had a literate, take-no-prisoners screenplay that had the magnificent Don Stroud spouting vicious obscenities (to Brenda Vaccaro) like: "You goddamned fucking cunt. You'll get yours, baby!"

Chuck Shamata, who plays an unbelievably sleazy dentist, almost steals the show as "Harry"; his attempts to get into Vaccaro's pants make up a major portion of the movie. Naturally, the deviant tooth puller gets his comeuppance at the hands of Stroud and his gang of psychopaths.

Unfortunately, the film has never been released on DVD anywhere in the world. Could it be that Ivan Reitman, one of the film's producers (yes, the Ghostbusters guy) is holding up the release because he's embarrassed by it? I sure hope not. This is the best goddamned film that prick has ever been involved with. The last I heard, MGM were holding the film's rights because of a deal that enabled them to acquire AIP product. If you're reading this, MGM (which I'm sure you're not), get off your fat,corporate be-hinds and start gathering the elements. Come on, get cracking!

During the House... screening, a second car joined the show. When the film finished, Last House started all over again; this was a common practise at US drive-ins.

The snow had gotten much heavier and thicker by that time and it was piling up on the bonnet so high that I needed to get out on several occasions and sweep it off.

So, knowing I'd be doing a lot more sweeping before the night was out, did I stay for a second viewing of Last House...?

What do you fuckin think?