There are two movies on my Worship Deluxe List: Apocalypse Now (1979, Francis Ford Coppola) and Stalker (1979, Andrej Tarkovskij). These are movies that deal with life, death and the unfathomable power of consciousness, spiritual enlightenment, turbulence and confusion. They work on so many levels, using cinematography and psychology in such subliminal ways it’s almost an hallucinatory experience watching them.

Having endured Konstantin Lopushansky‘s Pisma Myortvogo Cheloveka (Letters From A Dead Man aka Dead Man’s Letters (1986)), I might add it to the list. Lopushansky apparently worked with Tarkovskij on Stalker as a production assistant, and here he takes it to the next level: Nuclear winter, death and dying. It’s release coincided quite well with the Chernobyl distaster…

This is by far the most realistic post-apocalyptic vision I have ever experienced (alongside Threads, that is). It’s severely dark, haunting, and utterly depressing, and the screen is literally glowing of nuclear waste. There are no Mad Max haircuts in this one. It’s not funny or cool. It’s about emotional disintegration and the total resignation of life.

Almost all of existence above ground is wiped out. The environment is toxic. A few survivors finds a home in a bunker, and a physicist writes letters in his mind to his young son who went missing during the chaos. His wife is dying from radiation sickness. The days are as black as night, and the few remaining souls are contemplating death.
If you are a bit like me, you will contemplate what life really is after having watched this one.

The rest of this post is kind of spoiler-like, so you might wanna consider stop reading here.

There are so many memorable scenes, both beautiful, moving and disturbing. The one that really got me is when a survivor praises the achievements of humanity, and then commits suicide.
An absolute masterpiece.

All evidence suggests that the history of mankind has ended. It is time to sum up the outcome, and I think it should be done calmly, without vulgar affectation.

Today I want to talk to you like a dead man to other dead men. That is – frankly.
Let me present to you a speech for human beings as biological species.

Mankind was a tragic species, doomed perhaps from the very beginning. Our fatal and beautiful fate was to always attempt to bite off more than we can chew, be better than nature intended. We found a place in ourselves for compassion, even though it was conflicting with the law of survival. We managed to feel self-respect, even if it was always trampled on. We created art masterpieces, comprehending their uselessness and frailness. We found in ourselves the ability to love. Oh Lord, it was so difficult! For inexorable time caused our bodies, thoughts and senses to decay.

But man continued to love. And love created art, an art which reflects our unbearable yearning for perfection, our immense despair and our endless cry of terror, a howl of desolate thinking creatures in the cold and impassive space desert.

In this room, a lot of hateful words had been said about mankind, contemptous and scornful. But I won’t throw a stone at it today. That is what I say: I loved mankind. I love it even better now that it no longer exists. I love it for its tragic fate. And I want to say to you, colleagues, I want to say that I love you. Perhaps that is my leap of consciousness, but I wanted you to know.

Now I will go to my room and everything will end for me.
After all, we are all adults, and death is not a frightening thing when everything has died.

——————

OTHER GREAT MOVIES OF THE 80’s:
Manhunter (1986)
A Short Film About Killing (1988)
Threads (1984)
The Quiet Earth (1985)
The Thing (1982)
The Plague Dogs (1982)
Altered States (1980)

>The opening scene of The Plague Dogs (1982) really sets the tone.

A dog being subject to repeated drowning experiments. Outside the thunder roars, the rain comes down hard and a cold wind blows.
This is not Disney.

Two dogs escape from a British government animal testing lab – Animal Research (Scientific and Experimental), A.R.S.E. – and roam the grey and wintry Lake District in search of a new master, or rather, in search of a good human. The facility spreads the rumour that the animals are carrying bubonic plague, so being hated by humans and not knowing how to survive, they decide that they’ll have to ”live by our teeth and kill”.

This is a highly impressive, very realistic movie. It’s free from cool effects (even though the animation work is superb if you’re into old school stuff), kind of slow at times, and most importantly: it’s severely depressing, painful and sad.

Obviously, it still remains an underground movie since it actually has got something to say (something like this: The only way to free yourself from the cruelties of mankind is to die, so when the dogs swim out to sea in the end, they choose death instead of being killed by humans…). People with a short attention span probably won’t like it, and some scenes are pretty rough. It got censored due to graphical content, and only 8,000 copies of the uncut film exists on tape. It’s on YouTube, though.

Even though the dogs’ constant self-pitiness might become tedious after a while, I think the overall darkness and sadness of it all makes up for that. True animal friends most likely will cry when watching. Hell, you don’t even have to be a fanatic animal lover to be touched by this one. Anybody reaching the conclusion that mankind sucks ought to cry every once in a while.

The realism is a huge factor as well in making this a classic movie. Rowf’s fear of water, the death scenes and the dialogue are just a few examples of that.

I come to think of Grave of the Fireflies (a superb movie that everyone should see at least once) when watching The Plague Dogs, not really because they’re both animated films, but because of the depressing mood and the realism. Sometimes, stories like these are told more efficiently in comics and animated movies.

[Snitter, trapped in a garage, is hallucinating about his old home]
Rowf: Snitter! Can you hear me?
Snitter: I’m inside my head now. And it’s where I should be.
Rowf: This is no time for one of your turns!
The Tod: Come on out, ya great fool! Sharp with ye, now, before we’re all caught!
Snitter: I can’t come out. If I do, I’ll go mad again.

———-

OTHER GREAT MOVIES OF THE 80’s:
Manhunter (1986)
A Short Film About Killing (1988)
Threads (1984)
The Quiet Earth (1985)
The Thing (1982)

>

A science outpost at the South Pole, winter 1982. Unexplainable madness. Burnt human remains and melted bodies. A heavy storm. Alien mutations taking over and imitating the human body, leaving the few inhabitants scrambling in a paranoid, claustrophobic frenzy as they try to determine who’s infected and who’s not. Darkness descends. Extreme tension. Pretty soon it’s every man against every man – bellum omnium contra omnes – and within them: The ultimate in alien terror.

This masterpiece is like H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1936), Alien (1979), The Shining (1980) and Apocalypse Now (1979), all rolled into one.

Reservoir Dogs (1992) and The X-Files got some massive inspiration here as well.

The Thing (1982) has got that lovely, cheesy 80’s feeling, like when the technical aspects of movie making just started to develop into more hi-tech areas, and when people not quite knew how to handle their new tools but used them anyway. The drug-induced social realism featured in many movies of the 70’s is replaced by a bit plastic colours and feelings, quite noticeable stylistically, but also musicwise and how the camera works and moves. It’s like people stopped thinking and let the machines do most of the work. In other words, the 80’s cheese is a bit stiff, but that’s the great charm about these fantastic movies.

None the less, The Thing is probably the most realistic among the ”mainstream” horror movies of the 80’s, or, for that matter, amongst mainstream horror movies over all. There are a lot of eerie scenes. The one where they find the sarcophagus made of ice, for example, or when blood is drawn from each man to determine who is infected… Very creepy! The editing and sound is amazing in these scenes, and the music, the dark heartbeat-like rhythms made by Ennio Morricone, is crafted for worship. Here are the sounds of isolation, paranoia and darkness.

As for the alien, still to this day I think it’s pretty cool. Not as professional as in Alien, but hey… Disfigured corpses melting into each other rule, and that’s a fact.

It’s not all gloom and doom, though. In the beginning, it’s actually quite funny.

The mad Norwegian screaming: ”Se til helvete og kom dere vekk. Det er ikke en bikkje, det er en slags ting! Det imiterer en bikkje, det er ikke virkelig! KOM DERE VEKK IDIOTER!!” (”Get the hell outta there. That’s not a dog, it’s some sort of thing! It’s imitating a dog, it isn’t real! GET AWAY YOU IDIOTS!!”).

The black dude on roller skates: ”Maybe we’re at war with the Norwegians?”

And MacReady, who simply cannot distinguish between Norway and Sweden, yelling ”Hey, Sweden!” as he enters the Norwegian outpost.

That’s funny.

I believe this is the one movie that got me into horror and science fiction in the first place. I remember watching an old grimy VHS copy back in the 80’s, and now some 25 years later, I’ve got this awesome Blu-Ray edition. Both versions are cool, but if I could I’d mix the dirty picture quality of the VHS and the sound quality of the Blu-Ray, making it the ultimate ultimate in alien terror!

John Carpenter’s The Thing is a remake of Howard Hawks’ The Thing From Another World (1951). Sad to say, I still haven’t seen the original, although I own it. I guess I’m pretty stupid.

And now I hear there’s a prequel ready to launch in November 2011. We’ll see how that goes…

Until then:

It’s gonna get a hell of a lot worse before it gets any better.

———-

OTHER GREAT MOVIES OF THE 80’s:

Manhunter (1986)

A Short Film About Killing (1988)

Threads (1984)

The Quiet Earth (1985)