#62: Mute Witness (Anthony Waller, 1994)

I had low expectations for this movie. The only other Anthony Waller-directed movie I've seen is An American Werewolf in Paris, which is one of the flattest, most inert, least visually interesting movies of recent years, too boring even to be terrible. Mute Witness, on the other hand, though overly slick and perfunctory in visual style, is a suspenseful, skillfully told, entertaining film that successfully balances both the horror and crime thriller genres and a dramatic and comedic tone.

The storyline's not half bad. An American film crew is shooting a terrible slasher movie on the cheap in a Moscow studio. (Life imitating entertainment: the film's original script was set in Chicago, but the location was changed to Moscow because the sets and labor were much cheaper in Russia.) The main character is Billy, a mute woman who is the special effects artist (played by Russian actress Marina Zudina). Her sister is along, too, because she's dating the director, a spoiled doofus whose father has powerful political connections. After the day's shooting ends and the cast and crew start heading home, Billy runs back in the studio to find a prop they'll need for the next day's shooting. She's accidentally locked in and, because she's mute, can't get anybody's attention to let her out. She hears voices several minutes later, and she wanders on to an impromptu porn shoot involving an unknown woman and two members of the horror film's Russian crew. Her embarrassment soon turns into terror when she realizes the porn film is actually a snuff film. Spotted by the two Russians, she has to run, hide, and evade the men in the large, darkened film studio. This extended scene is truly scary, with Waller ratcheting up and successfully sustaining the suspense and tension.

After this scene, the horror elements recede and the film morphs into a Russian gangster thriller. While the menacing feeling still exists, comedic elements start creeping in, but Waller and his fine cast make it work. This part of the film often gets compared to Hitchcock, but I don't think the comparison is useful. It certainly doesn't do Waller any favors. Hitchcock was often attracted to plots involving innocent bystanders sucked into dark conspiracies, and I can see him finding the plot of Mute Witness enticing, but he was a master visual stylist. Waller's visual style lacks personality and merely serves the plot.

Despite Waller's limitations, Mute Witness is a highly enjoyable film, thanks to the novelty of its story, the capable handling of tone, and, especially, the solid international cast. Zudina has to carry the film solely through her facial expressions, and she pulls it off in a big way. Her face is very expressive and emotive. Oleg Yankovskiy, who died of cancer just last week, is great as an undercover detective, and the two Russians playing the snuff filmmakers are some seriously creepy-looking individuals. Perhaps the strangest bit of casting is an unbilled cameo by Alec Guinness as the head Russian gangster, known only as The Reaper. Guinness's involvement in the film is a truly bizarre story. His scenes were filmed nine years before the rest of the movie. Seriously. Nine years before the rest of the movie. I'm not kidding. Waller, who had never directed a movie in his life, convinced Guinness to shoot a quick scene for no pay from an early draft of his screenplay in 1985. Guinness agreed on the condition that he remain uncredited in the eventual film. Little did he know that his performance, filmed 15 years before his death, would eventually be his final big-screen credit in 1994. (His last official credit was a TV movie in 1996.) Guinness filmed the scene quickly in one morning before catching a flight. Surprisingly, Guinness's scene is seamlessly interwoven into the film and doesn't look like it was shot nine years before the rest of the movie. When Waller's revised screenplay called for another shot of Guinness later in the film, he just used extra footage from the 1985 shoot and reversed the film so Guinness appeared to be facing a different direction. Bizarro world.

#61: Mother's Day (Charles Kaufman, 1980)

Charles Kaufman, not to be confused with the screenwriter of Being John Malkovich et al., Charlie Kaufman, is the brother of Troma founder Lloyd Kaufman. If you've seen one Troma film, then you've seen pretty much every Troma film. Perfunctory framing of shots, bland cinematography, some of the ugliest location shooting in the dreariest parts of New York and New Jersey, fart jokes, boob jokes, fat jokes, extreme gore, porn star cameos, obvious genre satire, a preoccupation with toxic waste and nuclear mishaps. I'm glad Troma exists. It warms my heart that Lloyd Kaufman has managed to keep his production company going for so long, and I love what he has to say about Hollywood and big business and his support of independent filmmakers. But only rarely is a Troma film consistently entertaining (The Toxic Avenger, Tromeo & Juliet). I will never get the two hours of my life back I spent watching Surf Nazis Must Die. Surprisingly, Lloyd's brother Charles has a much more competent grasp of the basics of filmmaking, with a less labored approach to comedy, suspense, and horror in Mother's Day. Mother's Day is a solid, creepy horror film with some very funny moments and only a little bit of the torture and rape stuff I hate to watch. (By the way, the guy who directed Saw is remaking this film, with Brett Ratner producing. I'm sure the expensive Hollywood production values will make it look as forgettable as possible, and I'm also sure the torture and rape will be expanded and emphasized while the humor will disappear. I'm especially sure it will be a gigantic piece of shit.)

Mother's Day begins with a hilarious satire of self-help gurus. At a workshop in New York City, a tough-looking motivational speaker with a New Yawk accent and a bald bodyguard stands at a podium (the sign on the podium letting the crowd know that smoking, spitting, and watches are banned), tells the crowd, "Remember, once you go out those doors, don't stop to think about what you feel. Because once you stop to think about what you feel, you doubt what you know. And once you doubt what you know, you're gonna assume you don't know it. Why? Because you don't act on it. Once you know what you know, you act on it." A young couple at the workshop hitch a ride from an old woman. She begins to drive them to her home in rural New Jersey. The couple, pretending to be into the self-help guru so they can murder and rob the old lady and looking like a pair of young punks that Charles Bronson would mow down in a Death Wish movie, get a taste of their own medicine when the old lady's car conveniently dies and her Deliverance-esque grown sons jump out of the woods and attack and kill the pair. The mother tells her boys how proud she is of them. It's a heart-warming moment.
Next, we meet three female roommates at Wolfbreath College, about to graduate. (I was accepted to Wolfbreath College, but my family couldn't afford it. I had to attend the University of Nebraska instead. Oh, to call Wolfbreath my alma mater. What days those would have been.) The three women, who call themselves the Rat Pack, swear to be best friends forever, which is what women in their early twenties normally do, right? Not elementary school girls. Anyway, fast forward 10 years and the women's lives are very different. One is a wealthy socialite in Beverly Hills, one a spinster taking care of her sick mother in a small apartment in Chicago, and another is a career woman in New York supporting a mooching boyfriend who pretends to be an artist. The Beverly Hills sequence is particularly well done, centering on a hilarious pool party that Lloyd Kaufman jokingly claimed influenced the pool sequence in Boogie Nights. However, he may be right. The set-up of both pool parties and the movement of the camera in both scenes is surprisingly similar. Anyway, the Rat Pack still gets together once a year in a different location, the women taking turns selecting a vacation destination while keeping it a secret from the other two. This year, the three unfortunately camp out in the woods near Mother and her backwoods man-children. Fortunately, they get to smoke joints, skinny dip, hang out in their underwear, roast marshmallows, reminisce, and pledge undying friendship forever before the crazed hillbillies kidnap them and take them to their crazy house in the woods.

So far, the movie's been really fun, but it takes an unfortunate turn toward rape and torture for an unpleasant five minutes. I hate this kind of thing, especially since it's totally dominated mainstream American horror films for the past 10 years mostly thanks to that little punk piece of shit Eli Roth. (I have no idea what Quentin Tarantino sees in that guy.) Fortunately, the sequence doesn't last too long, and the movie gets entertaining again. The hiding, chasing, and stalking scenes have been done before in many horror films and thrillers, but Kaufman keeps the suspense level high.
There's a plot twist two-thirds in that closely mirrors Last House on the Left. I find that movie incredibly unpleasant, but somehow the similarly plotted Mother's Day greatly entertained me. And Mother's Day has one of the best horror movie endings I've ever seen. A subplot pays off in a big way. I won't say anymore than that.