The Mutant Chronicles

Where do you go after a movie like 8 1/2? When you've just had a gourmet meal, what do you eat the next time you get hungry?

You go to a genre picture like THE MUTANT CHRONICLES for the same reason you go to McDonald's after that gourmet meal. When you've had a transcendent experience, you need to reset. Otherwise, you won't give perfectly fine but otherwise average fare its due. You'll be measuring it against that masterpiece, and it'll come up short.

And THE MUTANT CHRONICLES is as greasy a burger as you could want after the feast of 8 1/2. It's poorly written, poorly edited, poorly scored, poorly acted, and poorly conceived. It's an uncomfortable mishmash of WWI, zombies, and apocalyptic science fantasy set in a steampunk world that doesn't understand that automatic weapons create more and worse tissue damage in less time than swords. It has lame prophecies, halfhearted fu, and John Malkovich reading his lines from the back of a prop. It's just plain bad in every way, a nice counterpoint to 8 1/2 and a good way to ensure that the subsequent pictures on my Netflix queue get a fair shake.

So, yeah, I'm recommending it, after a fashion. If you spend all your time in the best restaurants, you need to remind your palette what bad tastes like. THE MUTANT CHRONICLES does the trick.

The Mist

THE MIST wrung me out. This is a scary, exciting, depressing, and fulfilling movie that did not get the love it deserved.

The film, based on a Stephen King novella from _Skeleton Crew_, is a variation on one of King’s favorite themes: a group of people are trapped in an extraordinary, possibly supernatural, situation. The rules of civilization bend and snap, and we’re witnesses to our own best and worst selves.

Sure, there are monsters and gore effects and all that sort of thing, but THE MIST is really Lord of the Flies in a supermarket. While some folks may be put off by the film’s religious and political positions, it isn’t the positions themselves that matter so much as where the picture goes with them. THE MIST has a bleak view of humanity, it seems, but it also believes in the potential for nobility. I enjoyed its exploration of those ideas as much as I did the visceral fear, adventure, and desolation it had on offer; for I knew that those emotions were emotions in a box, feelings I could sample for a while, then put away. But what I can’t put away are some of the ideas of THE MIST, particularly the one about the fragility of civilization and the human compact. I don’t agree with its position, because I consistently see people at their best when things are at their worst, but the film does offer rich food for thought, nonetheless.