Perhaps it's fitting that three of the best, most interesting big-budget American films out now are horror movies (of unusual intensity and gore): James Cameron's "Aliens," Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2" and David Cronenberg's "The Fly."
These movies plunge right down into the livid guts of pathology. They're squirmy, crawly, blecchy movies. They rub your nose in death; they're full of blood, entrails and the body's topography. Two of them ("Aliens" and "Chainsaw 2") have an almost unprecedented, nonstop graphic violence: chase scenes that go on and on, attacks that seem endless, heroines that are threatened, saved and threatened all over again. The movies may make people jump or even retch. But at least, afterward, they can say they've felt something.
Which is more than most current major releases offer you: American movies throughout 1985 and 1986 seem to be taking place in a fancy vacuum, barely connected to the American landscape, to the topical reality that's always been the movie's meat.
Comparatively, "Aliens," "Chainsaw 2" and "The Fly" seem to be alive--even if their subject matter is an obsession with death. All three wallow in the things that seem wrong with today's movies: violence, sensationalism, sex, an over-reliance on the 15- to 25-year-old market (though "Chainsaw" is off limits to anyone under 17). And they're presold and pretested: Two are sequels and one a remake. In a way, they've mastered the current aesthetics of trash, waste, emptiness and bad taste.
And despite their gore, they're not as offensive as the run-of-the-muck horror "product." In slasher rip-offs and cutouts, the victims are basically interchangeable: blood-squirting puppets to be dispatched at programmed intervals. (You're reminded of "Shoah," of the way the death-camp guards sealed themselves from the reality of mass slaughter by referring to the corpses of gassed inmates not as people but as "rags" or "dolls.") In "Aliens" and "Chainsaw"--and especially "The Fly"--the people count more.
They have something else in common: There's a sympathetic, threatened female at the center. And all three have the germ of a realistic drama, elaborated into a wild nightmare. "Aliens" could be about a wartime woman trying to rescue an abandoned child. "Chainsaw II" mines the fear of eccentrics, rape and murder. And in "The Fly"--the best of the three--Geena Davis' Veronica could be a professional whose lover is descending into drug addiction or disease. (More than George Langelaan's story, or Kurt Neumann's 1958 "Fly," Cronenberg's film suggests Nicholas Ray's 1956 "Bigger Than Life," with James Mason as a decent middle-class teacher succumbing to cortisone abuse and paranoia.)
"Aliens" won the most raves of the three, but it's the lesser achievement. Its story is the most sentimental, straight-ahead and conventional: a little girl, a doll and dozens of last-minute rescues. But it's the kind of movie many people--especially industry people--feel has to be great. Anything that makes them react so violently, that looks so slick and expensive, has so many obviously classy "elements" (James Horner's superb pseudo-Bartok score, the eye-popping sets and camera work) must be a triumph.
And it is, though its coups are basically mechanical. This movie--in which Sigourney Weaver's Ripley returns to the planet of mucoid, parasitic, all-devouring monsters and spends an hour, along with some half-Hawksian macho Marines and a plucky blonde tot, fleeing hell-for-leather through the wreckage--gets away from you too fast. It hooks you, but it doesn't have the resonance of either Ridley Scott's 1979 film or Cameron's previous "The Terminator." (Perhaps Cameron was trying too hard to "correct" elements he disliked in the big hit he co-wrote, "Rambo," defusing its "superman" militarist mystique.)
Watching "Aliens" is something like being dropped down a greased slide--or in and out of the intestine fun house. It's scary and horrific, a mile-a-minute hell drop, but when you shoot out the other end the nightmare is washed clean. You're just breathless. (Maybe ready for another ride.) The test of a great movie is not just what happens to you in the theater--but what happens afterward, what you're left with. There's more stuff sticking to you--the edges of your mind, your emotional ganglia and viscera--after "Chainsaw 2" and "The Fly."
Writer L. M. Kit Carson and director Hooper have made "Chainsaw 2" a grisly hoot: a wild satire on modern Texas and horror movies themselves. Here the maniac family has become rich, mired in marketing and mass franchises. They're fast-food entrepreneurs, blood-stained Ronald McDonalds. (Since their customers and their secret chili ingredient are identical--young Texas yuppies--the whole thing sometimes seems like a drunken nightmare of the James Woods character in "Salvador.")
