Twitch-O-Meter: The Implacable Lightness of Being - 5 Eco-Horror Films for Our Times.

THE HAPPENING
M. Night’s film came and went last month, falling and thumping as fast as a construction worker walking off the 4th story of a half-finished building.  Despite a laundry lists of flaws, The Happening still manages to succeed as an edge-of-your-seat apocalypse flick with a good old 1950s War of the Worlds kind of vibe.  Watch and tremble as Shyamalan shows many insert-shots of trees blowing in the wind!  Shiver as Mark Wahlberg talks like a petulant child in the face of a world gone mad.  Salivate as the mighty hot-dog is defended for ‘getting a bad rap’ by a plant-loving oddball.  Even if you can not take too much of the film seriously and despite this type of ‘end-of-the-world’ scenario tackled so often (and better) in recent times, the unpredictable nuttiness from scene-to-scene makes it a more entertaining than most (will it be serious, will it be funny, will the characters attempt to outrun the wind?). The message comes down hard:  If a tree falls in the forest, will it get back up and defend its ground?

MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE
You may not at first think ‘eco-horror’ when the strains of AC/DC kick in on the soundtrack and an 18 wheel tractor trailer with a Green Goblin mask mounted to the front comes barreling down the road.  But you would be wrong.  This nifty little Steven King thriller has all the machines rising up against to common folk for inexplicable reasons.  Death by pop-machine?  Maximum Overdrive has it.  The voice of Lisa Simpson, Yeardly Smith, as a tediously annoying newly wedded bride?  Check.  Electric carving knives gone wild?  Indeed.  Psychotic trucks demanding the few remaining humans trapped in a highway diner pump them full of life-giving diesel?  You got it.  Actually it is that last bit that is a compelling image of our times:  technology and the machines need to be fed regardless of the cost to the out-of-date organic life-forms hanging around that jumps out in retrospect, although don’t think too hard with this one (It ain’t even the Matrix).  Sit back and enjoy the mayhem and anthem rock.

THE LAST WINTER
Larry Fessenden’s arctic set film is about a team of oil-surveyors trying to get their equipment into a Alaskan national park to begin drilling.  It is savagely political work, even more so than An Inconvenient Truth, and one of the smartest eco-horror entries in the room.  In regards to its message it is clear enough in the opening scene involving a mockery of a corporate video;  with the gleeful narrator salivating over the potential of raping one of the most remote untouched parks in America of the bubbling crude.  Fessenden delights in the irony that the arctic tundra is defrosting in the middle of winter and preventing the heavy drilling and pumping trucks from getting to the new well. 

The small team of workers, lead by the blustery and no-shit foreman played by Ron Perlman who is kinda pissed that he has to deal with environmental watch-dog played by James LeGros.  When one of their crew starts to hallucinate, Perlman blames the isolation, LeGros is concerned about toxic ‘Sour Gas’ oozing up through the thawing muskeg.  Odds are it is something much, much worse though, you can tell by the gathering crows and wide-angle shots of white nothingness dwarfing figures in the frame.  While the movie starts out mundane (and more than a little talky), things go from tense to bloody and never let up until the apocalyptic finale.  Sour Gas kills!

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK
Far from your typical horror fare, Peter Weir’s haunting yet baffling film is be better described as “uncanny” than horrific.  A creeping sense of unease permeates the picture and the characters contained and overshadowed by the raw size and scope of the Australia landscape. Not knowing why things are happening is the driving force of this film (and Weir’s almost as good follow up, The Last Wave), and the effects on the confused characters serve as the horror element.  Something malevolent this way comes.

Set at the turn of the 20th century, the theme is one common in Australian cinema: the ‘civilized world’ bumping up against the immense mysteries of the large unexplored wilderness Down Under. During a Valentine’s Day picnic outing of an all girls school, several of the girls mysteriously disappear. The community and the remaining girls react differently to a mystery which does not seem offer a substantial solution. Some of the reactions are quite shocking. The quiet pacing at the beginning of the film have the effect to lull the viewer and leave them unprepared for some of the shocks in the second half. Indeed, while clothed in white petticoats, open sunshine, and gorgeous cinematography (set to an enigmatic Gheorghe Zamfir pan-pipe score), Picnic at Hanging Rock still offers horrors of the kind that dig deep into the soul.

SAFE

Are you allergic to the 20th Century?

In Todd Haynes’ significantly overlooked 1995 film it is quite possible that Carol may indeed be allergic to living in the modern world. Carol (an ethereal Julianne Moore) is quiet, unassuming, and to be honest, more than a bit vapid. She does not smoke, drink, or pop pills, in fact she refers to herself as a milkoholic. She is the second wife of a well-off executive-type and stepmother to his young boy. She keeps the upscale California household running by telling the various maids and such what to do. Other than that, exercise classes, visits to the salon, and ordering furniture pretty much round off her existence. So unnoticed and uninvolved, she practically blends into the wallpaper, even while having sex with her husband!

When she begins to mysteriously ill (trust me, you will never look at getting a perm the same way again), and her doctor asserts multiple times that nothing is wrong medically, nobody knows how to react. Blame and frustration from her husband, casual ostracization from her social circle, but perhaps most significantly, a confused victim hood from herself. Salvation lies (of all places) in an infomercial from a benevolent clinic in the middle of the Texas desert which helps people who are, in fact, allergic to modern living.  Out of the frying pan and into the fire.