Things 3: Old Things

This DVD caught my eye because the box said it had an adaptation of Mary Shelley other than _Frankenstein_, but when I saw the trailer after I got it home that evening, fearing the worst, I decided to read all the stories first. The Wells story is an enigma--nothing happens except that an antique dealer named Mr. Cave keeps looking into an alien world until he is eventually found dead on the floor. Sounds good enough for a frame story, but it's rather artificial here. The best performances in the film are from Greg Cannone as Winston Kale and Oriana Tavoularis as his wife, Alice Cave. Cannone's performance is unfortunately hit-and-miss, with line readings that sometimes feel read for only the second time, but sometimes seem natural and appropriate. He looks a little like Chris Weitz without the annoying ear-indentation. Alice goes a little wacko at the death of her mother, but as irritating as she is with Winston, and as unreasonable as she can be, she always manages to remain endearing through her cute appearance and essential ill-placement in a horror film, as her slightly over-the-top performance seems to belong in a comedy.

The film claims to have been processed in a film lab, but it looks shot on video, and has lame character-generator titles indicative of home video, as well, but if it is, at least Ford had a decent flying-erase head, since the edits are never defect-jumpy.

Mary Shelley, in "Transformation" (not "The Transformation" as on the credits) originally wrote of Guido, exiled from Genoa by a Marchese (also his beloved Juliet's father) after returning from a riotous travel. On an island, he encounters a dwarf who demands a three day exchange of bodies, and in what turns out to be one of her weaker works, does so exactly to take his place and to have Juliet, confirming Guido's worst fears--though how the dwarf knows about him and why he would specifically choose to mess up his life is unknown). All ends happily. Not so for Eric, who is obsessed with a 19th-century dominatrix photo purchased from Cave Antiques. His girlfriend, Virginia, reveals the most hideous boob job ever (disproportionate, lopsided, you name it) in her lunchtime motel breaks with Eric, who then goes to a strip club. Veronica Carothers gives a wonderfully sympathetic performance as Crystal. She reveals without saying anything about it something of a painful past, and she makes you want Eric to give her a hug for being sympathetic with him. Perhaps I should correct myself about the acting since her performance actually distracts from that she's visibly topless the whole scene. Unfortunately, it doesn't last as Shelley's dwarf, whom Guido kills to get his wounded body back, is a cat creature who is also the dominatrix. Here the performance generates into something worthy of edited porn like _Droid_. To little is made of her trading bodies with him, which is surprising considering the film in general and the Shelley adaptation specifically is not in very good taste. Rather than take his girl, she had needlessly gory and fake looking violence in mind.

Although I found Kipling's "The Mark of the Beast" to be the weakest story of the three, it is, for all its updates, the most faithfully adapted and best done, though all the writing in this film is bad, and the dialogue here is like artless Mamet. The decision to retell it as a gangster story, though, actually works, and "Film Star Randal Malone" gives a ridiculously overacted and slightly queer performance as Harry Green, who was Fleete in Kipling's original. The change of the Indian setting replaces a Hanuman statue with the banality of a wolf ring, and an effeminate Craig Johnson, reminiscent of Jaye Davidson in _Stargate_ replaces Kipling's leper. The changes made to the story reflect entirely the gangster world of the film (which intrudes rather implausibly onto the Cave story--their antique store exterior looks wrong for the kind of neighborhood this would occur in, and generally too big), leading again to a ridiculously violent end. I was kind of disappointed that Ford deleted Kipling's shoehorn-gag scene , but the wolf-suit is so rubbery (and rather apelike) it would probably make it look even more fake. It seems strange that the shaman never bothers to pick up the finger they sever so he can go to a hospital and get it put back on. Ford also adds the thugs turning on each other, which at least fits.

The ending, which is given away in the trailer, is a disappointment--Alice gets a death scene unworthy of her that should not have been fatal, creates _Jabberwocky_-like gore, and reduces Wells's octopoid Martian whatsit (perhaps a War of the Worlds prequel?), into ugly anthropophages erroneously referred to as cannibals on the badly typoed box.

Overall, this is a weak film, its chief interest being exactly what I bought it for--that it is an adaptation of these classic stories. It has its moments, but is overall an amateurish work. On the plus side, even though it certainly could have used a once-over by someone more talented at dialogue, the concept isn't too bad and at least gives a better justification for the lame, borderline campy, gore effects that many others will want to view the film for, than most others of its budget and ilk, no thanks to Ford, but thanks to Wells, Shelley, and Kipling.