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Movie Review
"Stop Making Sense"
Fifteen years later, the delightful Talking Heads concert pic is still the kind of miracle movie that comes about once in a lifetime.
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Movie Review
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Column
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[09/13/99]

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Sixteen years later, all these subgenres have burned out or gone the route of self-parody, and droves of moviegoers are drinking in souped-up cover versions of Serling's Greatest Hits. The top three films at the box office for the weekend ending Sept. 12 were "Stigmata," "The Sixth Sense" and "Stir of Echoes." In "Stigmata," a with-it Pittsburgh hair stylist is either demonically or angelically possessed. In "The Sixth Sense," a lonely Philadelphia boy who interacts mostly with dead people learns how to stop worrying and love the ghosts. In "Stir of Echoes," a stressed-out blue-collar Chicago family man, with another little boy who also sees and speaks to the deceased, becomes clairvoyant himself and lays bare an ugly crime.

These movies draw crowds partly because they sound a nostalgic chord, and not just for Serling: An MGM executive chalked up the surprise boffo opening of "Stigmata" to baby boomers yearning for an "Omen" or "Exorcist" fix. But younger audiences who've never experienced movie terror outside of slice-and-dice extravaganzas may show up for the novelty -- and find a weird, pseudo-deep kind of comfort in having their fears of life confirmed.

Yet none of these films tested my quease quotient. (And when it comes to horror, I'm an easy mark: gullible and squeamish.) Each of them merely takes a basic horror situation, sets it in a weathered locale, adds old-fashioned supernatural motifs and finishes everything off with a New Age twist that re-asserts the existence of an afterlife, complete with limbo and redemption. If you've ever followed "The Twilight Zone," you look for the series' trademark O. Henry turnaround -- but in these films, you find it way too early. Most of the classic "Twilight Zone" episodes were half-hours; the briefest of these films clocks in at 100 minutes.

It's more than thinness and familiarity that makes these movies dull. Serling's genius was to let subterranean tensions out and let 'em rip; these films' folly is to let them out and tame them. To watch Serling's series in reruns is to feel like a fraidy-cat again, a child in a semi-stable world whose grownups misguide you into ignoring the dangers beneath placid surfaces. Unlike traditional climaxes, the endings of the episodes aren't always happy or unhappy. Much of the time they are uncertain: They don't reassert the status quo, and they rarely rub your nose in religiosity.

These movies do. The spiritual realm -- so bracing and ambiguous when it entered the physical realm in Serling's series, or in big-screen horror classics like "The Innocents" -- becomes, in these pictures, a sphere as easy to grasp and as thudding as a kickball. The fledgling horror moviemakers literalize everything, both to impart an unearned gravity to their scripts and to foster the illusion that, beneath the anarchy and ephemera of millennial life, we're still part of a Great Chain of Being. It's as if they want to bear out our suspicions that the world has gone to hell and uplift us with a glimpse of peace in paradise.

Even gratuitous set pieces make you wonder whether you're seeing a bad patch of loose threads or a failed tapestry of faith. In "Stir of Echoes," for example, a community of clairvoyants gets a momentous introduction only to disappear from view. Of course, this may just be sloppiness on the part of the writer-director, David Koepp, who adapted "Twilight Zone" contributor Richard Matheson's original novel. But more likely, Koepp wanted to use this group of savants to solidify an audience's belief in the intersection of the netherworld and our world.

Unfortunately, all this spirit-mongering tends to produce not mystery or terror but bogus reassurance. These movies end up saying that dead people invade our lives solely to beg for help, no matter how violent their pleas. Even the pictorially striking, superficially daring "Stigmata," which spews venom at corrupt clerics in the Roman Catholic Church, rests on the burning desire of a deceased renegade priest -- and that of a dedicated Vatican investigator -- to get out the real Word of Christ.

Next page | The freaky performance of young Haley Joel Osment in "The Sixth Sense"