End of Days
Directed (and photographed by) Peter Hyams
Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gabriel Byrne, Robin Tunney, Kevin
Pollack
and Udo Kier.
(available on video)
* (one star)
no
time to read the whole review?
THE
JIST of MY PROSE
Like reading the mind of an intelligent film-lover,
you can probably guess that the utter idiocy contained and encoded in these
123 minutes of melodramatic fury, loud explosions and showy special effects
bored me to tears. Arnold is a laugh, but not the "it's-worth-renting-to-giggle
-in-a-drunken-stupor" funny, the "you-have-enough-money-to-retire-and-not-put-us-through-this"
funny. And let's face it, that Axl Rose song over the end credits isn't
donating to the cause.
Know what I find alarmingly ironic about the
so-called “horror” genre today?
First off, it only exists in other forms : thriller, drama, science-fiction.
And second, it’s
use of those forms causes it to come at us strained and uneven : a
good, creepy image
here and there, but mostly failed atmospheres brimming with antithetical
special effects
and loud, not eerie, but loud sounds. It’s funny that most of the “horror”
films I’ve been
unlucky enough to see this year (‘The Haunting’, ‘The House on Haunted
Hill’, ‘Stir of
Echoes’, to name a few - I’m leaving out the big ones for a reason)
have been full of
showy effects, one or two disturbing flashes - mostly filler and false
scares sitting on top
of chase scenes and blue screens. And seeing ‘End of Days’- a clunker
that’s full of stuff
that would be bad in a regular film and stuff that’s bad in a “horror”
film - on a small
screen, I’ve realized what the great horror films (which reside, like
Latin, in a
remembered but unspoken field) knew all along : scary isn’t what we
can see, it’s what
we cannot see and what we can imagine. And it’s not supposed to merely
tease our eyes,
but also our imagination. And I’m sick of hearing people bitch about
‘The Blair Witch
Project’ (course, I guess to be slightly compassionate, they are all
conditioned filmgoers
who need a movie shrink) and rave about the ending to ‘The Sixth Sense’.
They should
be proud a film like ‘The Blair Witch Project’ allows films like ‘End
of Days’ to exist in
the same market (and pay their collaborators better) and be humbled
before the
beautifully structured atmosphere ‘The Sixth Sense’ commands with minimal
computer
tinkering.
On the whole, my schpiel
on ‘End of Days’ would be very boring and familiar
sounding. Predictably, the film tries to earn our respect by using
long philosophical
strands of biblical mayhem and then mangles them into hack screenplay
land (a land
where the writer thinks the audience is just as naive as Arnold trying
to shoot the devil
with a handgun. Swear to God, a handgun). And very predictably, any
straight or
mythical tone is shattered the minute Jericho (Schwarzenegger would’ve
been a less
dumbass name) opens his mouth to speak. The film is constantly garnering
laughs where
it’s not supposed to (It should take a note from ‘The Ninth Gate’,
which balances this
whole “purposefully comedic/genuinely satanic” undertone whirlwind
masterfully).
Finally, I wondered aloud to myself whether or not to criticize
the film when the
gigantic special effects devil (you can almost see Stan Winston’s handwriting
on it’s
seams) appears before Jericho in the loud, “finally, I can go home!”
finale. On one hand,
it’s the big guy you defeat at the end of the level in a video game.
On the other hand, that
would make the rest of the movie a video game, one I was obviously
not playing but
watching someone else play. I hadn’t put the quarter in, so I guess
it wasn’t my fault the
film was occupying my attention. Expect nothing, get nothing, lose
nothing - right? And
it was no longer a waste of my money, but a waste of my time (which
I would’ve wasted
anyway, right?).
Then I thought, nah
- that big-ass Satan-thing is really cool looking and I’m going
deaf from the loud explosions, which sound more like a dog farting
than hellfire.
‘The Blair Witch Project’ wasn’t scary. I couldn’t have possibly
guessed Bruce
Willis was, you know, at the end of ‘The Sixth Sense’. (‘Atmosphere’?)
And maybe
‘The Haunting’ wasn’t so crapp -
Wait a minute. Where’s
Ben and what have you done with him?
‘End of Days’ is a lot of
noise that I could have slept through easily. And I want
my quarter back. Even if it isn’t mine.
home
1999