I never wrote anything formal about the film Martha Marcy May Marlene, but those who follow me on Twitter or who talk to me in person know that despite the buzz and hype surrounding the film, I really think it’s just an okay movie. The story about a young woman (a pretty decent Elizabeth Olsen) leaving a backwoods cult behind and moving back in with her sister works thanks to writer-director Sean Durkin, who has a great visual eye and is able to balance the film’s off kilter plot structure. Outside of that and the performances, I struggle to think of any real reason to recommend the movie.
It left me absolutely cold. The story is told in the blandest of possible ways with very little real emotion to hold it together. The tone is distressingly monotonous almost to the point where it feels like I was watching a Sofia Coppola remounting of Helter Skelter. Now, I guess this is where film criticism comes down to personal preference, but if there is nothing that I can invest myself in or emotionally connect to, I start paying attention more to the craft than to the finished product. I like the technical mastery behind MMMM, but I can’t help but think there’s a better way to tell this story. All of the characters were so needlessly one-note that the story around them didn’t really matter.
About all that film did was make me wonder if other films about cults were all similarly afflicted with a dearth of emotion. I was actually able to think of one that also utilizes MMMM’s ability to move back and forward in time, and possibly even in and out of dreams that may or may not be reality. Of course, in terms of overall quality 1988’s Nightmare on Elm Street rip off Bad Dreams has nothing on the thoughtfully photographed landscapes of this year’s cult themed drama, but the film’s lead character is definitely going through something similar.
Bad Dreams might have been the first film that I ever personally recognized to be an abject rip off of a film I really enjoyed. Just look at that trailer!
I don’t know, Don LaFontaine, CAN I survive Bad Dreams?
If that was too subtle, this blubbering TV spot will send its obvious Freddy Krueger leanings right out the window.
Produced by a failed micro-division of 20th Century Fox (similar to one that Paramount will be rolling out in January with The Devil Inside) called No Frills Films (headed by Terminator and Aliens producer Gale Anne Hurd) with the express purpose of churning out low budget genre fare, Bad Dreams served as the debut film for writer-director Andrew Fleming (Hamlet 2, Dick, The Craft), and was co-written by Steven E. de Souza, who would become a known Hollywood talent thanks to the success of Die Hard later that same year. In another parallel to MMMM, Bad Dreams is made by some undoubtedly talented people, but still isn’t very good.
The film opens sometime in the mid-70s on some Middle American farmland to the strains of The Chamber Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today.” On this land is the meeting house of the love cult known as Unity Fields, headed by the enigmatic Harris (Invasion U.S.A. villain Richard Lynch). The members of the cult have reached the end of their time on Earth and are about to embark on the ultimate “bonding between man and wife, parent and child” by dousing themselves in gasoline while Harris lights the match to send them home (or some shit like that).
The lone holdout on Harris’ plan is a young woman named Cynthia, who ends up surviving the Jim Jones’ style mass suicide when the house explodes and buries her under rubble. The ensuing injuries land Cynthia in a thirteen year coma.
When Cynthia awakes (played as an adult by Jennifer Rubin, returning to a hospital set film after playing Taryn in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors), she has become a woman out of time trying to piece together the memories she had of the commune in much the same way that Martha does in her film. Also similar is the way Cynthia seems to be straddling the line between guilt (for leaving her brothers and sisters in spirit behind) and depression (the inability to comprehend the new, old world she has to become acclimated to all over again).
It’s this balance between survivor guilt and confusion that drives the admittedly hokey story of the film. Cynthia seems to be plagued by waking nightmares that may or may not be real that become integrated into the story. MMMM also does this, playing with the blurred lines between past, present, and perceived reality, but Bad Dreams uses it as the jumping off point for a slasher film.
Cynthia is admitted by hospital honcho Dr. Berrisford (character actor extraordinaire Harris Yulin) to the psychiatric ward for a perceived borderline personality disorder. She is placed in the direct care of Dr. Alex Karmen (Re-Animator’s Bruce Abbott), and forced to attend group therapy sessions despite having a personality so fractured that she feels out of place. In this group is the usual cast of misfits: the leering jokester who likes to cut himself (Summer School’s Dean Cameron), the mousy quiet girl (famed voiceover actress E.G Daily, probably best known as the voice of Tommy Pickles on TV’s Rugrats), a disgraced tabloid reporter, an older couple secretly hooking up with each other in the least subtle way possible, and a hipster looking Jesus freak.
Cynthia begins seeing visions of a sometimes horribly burned and disfigured Harris, who seems intent on bringing her over to the other side to join the rest of her “family.” When a confused Cynthia refuses the apparition’s (?) advances, Harris starts claiming the lives of the patients around her, sometimes in her own visions and sometimes driving the patients so mad that they kill themselves. Dr. Karmen suspects something is up, Dr. Berrisford seems like he couldn’t care less, and a police detective who witnessed the aftermath of Unity Fields (Sy Richardson) is on hand to constantly point the finger of blame at Cynthia.
For a first feature, Fleming’s film feels remarkably assured. (It might be because producer Hurd rounded out the production team with James Cameron’s technical cohorts who were patiently waiting for production delays on The Abyss to work themselves out.) The transitions between reality and the dream world are very well done, leading the film’s obvious gaps in logic and disregard for spatial relations to not be that noticeable on a first glance. Most first time filmmakers have a hard time telling the difference between a framing device and an excuse to let the story skip ahead to the good parts, but Fleming is particularly adept here when it comes to match cutting and the use of sound cues to transition in and out of Cynthia’s visions.
But much like I said earlier about this year’s awards bait, why am I paying such close attention to the craft here? Probably because much like how MMMM tries a rigidly minimalist approach to come across as being creepy, the story and performances are trying too hard in this film. It swings for the fences, but the ball drops in for a double and the bat is in the fucking parking lot.
Rubin is bad. Really, really bad, and with the exception of Cameron (who maniacally dances a tightrope between making his character sympathetic and loathsome), the rest of the victims don’t fare much better. They’re only on screen for occasionally bloody death sequences, but they really play up the crazy factor as if everyone is trying to one-up each other. Even on the doctor side of the equation, Abbot doesn’t seem to fully get the tone of the film, fluctuating between comically flabbergasted and almost painfully reflective to the point I thought he was trying to pass a kidney stone in the scene where he finally pieces together just what’s been going on.
At least the script does a good job of supplanting genre expectations for most of the film. No one dies in the “established order” that most 80s horror flicks rigidly adhered to, which is wise considering this film’s unenviable release just as the bottom was about to fall out of the market for slasher and “rubber reality” films. The ending offers a nifty twist that’s somehow logical from a plotting perspective (it does tie everything together), but inane from a common sense perspective. It also has the good sense to wrap everything up in 80 minutes (or the exact amount of time it takes for the inciting incident of MMMM to take place, because, you know, it’s artsy like that).
(There is an alternate ending to the film that was very wisely axed because it drags on forever and makes absolutely zero sense. It also forgoes the bitchin' choice to use Guns N Roses' "Sweet Child O' Mine" as the film's closing credits music.)
While this really isn’t anything more than a quickie Wes Craven clone designed to cash in on an impending writer’s strike, it might be one of the best of its kind. It’s certainly a better movie than it has any right to be. Hence why it falls into that same middle ground that MMMM falls into for me with both being good, but not great. One film didn’t meet my expectations, while the other one surpassed them. Life is funny like that sometimes.
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