John Sayles

  • Piranha (1978)

    Piranha (1978)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2021) In retrospect, I really shouldn’t be surprised that the original 1978 Piranha reminded me so much of its detestable 2010s remake. Isn’t that the point of it? But there’s a crucial difference in how the original, for all of its terribly dated visuals, muddy cinematography and primitive special effects, actually benefits from its limitations. Not feeling forced to show everyone being graphically dismembered, this film does have the sometimes-amusing spirit of a classic monster movie, with the horror being tolerable rather than ultraviolent. It only barely qualifies as a horror/comedy considering how often women and children are the targets of the hungry piranhas. Director Joe Dante directs a John Sayles script with some skill, and the results of both filmmakers’ efforts are apparent: the justification for the monstrous piranhas is hallway witty, while the direction steadily cribs from 1970s disaster films and, most obviously, 1975’s Jaws. Alas, Piranha does remain a bloodbath of a monster film, so my liking for the result remains limited—but it’s a bit better than I expected.

  • The Howling (1981)

    The Howling (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Youtube Streaming, August 2020) There is a lot of interesting stuff in werewolf dark comedy horror film The Howling – but I’m not too sure it all adds up to a better-than-interesting movie. There is a lot to like, for instance, in the blend of influences that end up in the script as a TV reporter, traumatized by an experience with a serial killer, is sent to a rehabilitation “colony” where she encounters werewolves. It’s not your average plot premise, and the blend of TV journalism with somewhat dubious new age therapy both feels very specific to the early 1980s and still provocative today. Add to that a typically clever directing job by Joe Dante, working from a script rewrite by John Sayles to add dark humour to the proceedings, and The Howling is a lot more than your average horror film. Then, perhaps most of all, there are the practical special effects all culminating into a lengthy werewolf transformation scene that’s both impressive (for its time) and a bit of a showing-off. The opening sequence is gripping, the closing scene is a nice attempt at collapsing the masquerade, and in-between we’ve got unpredictable moments all over the place. All of this should make The Howling much better than it is – but in the end it still feels like a disappointment. Much of this has to do with a scattershot approach that’s not as disciplined as it should be. The links between the serial killer that dominates the film’s first few minutes and the werewolf film that it becomes are preposterous. The pacing of the film is all over the place, and arguably shoots itself in the foot by having a mid-film transformation sequence far more impressive than the climax. Dramatic tension varies widely with great moments stranded in the middle of long stretches of nothing. While The Howling has a frank post-New Hollywood approach to the links between werewolves and animalistic erotic desire, it ultimately doesn’t do much with that (compare/contrast with The Hunger if you will). The actors do well without doing exceptionally well (maybe they were cowed by the special effects) and the direction is flashy without being sustained. In other words, The Howling does not amount to more than the sum of its parts, and, in fact, suffers when some parts subtract from the total. I still think it’s worth a look for fans of 1980s horror as one of the most daring takes on familiar material, but it doesn’t wrap it all up satisfyingly.

  • Alligator (1980)

    Alligator (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) As B-grade monster movies go, Alligator is remarkably good—and while this may not translate into a good movie on most scales, it does make for pretty good entertainment. Taking the urban legend to heart, this film follows the adventure of a police officer and a herpetologist as they fight a gigantic alligator turned loose in the sewers of “Chicago,” and turned to gigantic size by some pharmaceutical research shenanigans. Alligator does take a while to rev up, but by midpoint the film is able to show (in relatively low-budget fashion) a city gripped with terror and marshalling a grand police response. The highlight of the film is clearly the upscale party sequence in which the alligator eats municipal oligarchs, guests, servants, and cars alike. What’s interesting throughout the film is that the script by John Sayles (then a budding filmmaker, not the indie darling and script doctor he’d later become) constantly messes around with assumptions of the genre in utterly deadpan fashion, throwing various tangents (a nasty journalist, a big-game hunter, corrupt executives, etc.) and reining them in with a reasonably good sense of story structure. On the execution side, Robert Foster is quite likable as a jaded policeman fighting against the monster. Alligator is not particularly great even as a monster film (there’s a significant distance between it and Tremors, for instance), but it’s watchable enough and clever enough to significantly eclipse much of the genre. It’s particularly good for late-night B-movie fans.

  • Eight Men Out (1988)

    Eight Men Out (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2019) I’m not much of a baseball person, but even I found myself gradually interested in Eight Men Out’s depiction of the World Series-fixing scandal of 1919—a sordid little footnote in American sports history during which gamblers managed to convince a few White Sox players to deliberately lose games and be compensated by a share of the profits. Perhaps the most interesting thing in writer-director John Sayles’ film is the way even a fixing operation is fraught with complexity: It’s not enough to even convince the players (in this case, helped along by the baseball team owner’s legendary cheapness)—you have to prevent leaks, ensure that they’re paid, and fight against every player’s instinct to win. A bunch of name actors (including John Cusack, David Strathairn, Charlie Sheen and others) help keep Eight Men Out interesting even despite the absence of a satisfying climax: the film mirrors the regrettable real events that led to the lifelong expulsion of eight players from the baseball league—including Shoeless Joe Jackson—, the team owners asserting their control over players (a decades-old theme) and national disillusionment about the purity of baseball. Despite the usual warnings against learning history from Hollywood movies, Eight Men Out is a fascinating illustration of incidents that many would rather not acknowledge … making it even more important a subject.