Spontaneous Combustion (1990)

 

Director: Tobe Hooper

Screenplay: Tobe Hooper and Howard Goldberg

Cast: Brad Dourif as Sam; Cynthia Bain as Lisa Wilcox; Jon Cypher as Dr. Marsh; William Prince as Lew Orlander; Melinda Dillon as Nina; Dey Young as Rachel; Tegan West as Springer; Michael Keys Hall as Dr. Cagney

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #225

 

I am a Tobe Hooper apologist. For many, Hooper made The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and then everything after baring Poltergeist (1982) is ignored. For me, not only did he start earlier with an experimental hippie comedy named Eggshells (1969), thus undermining the notion he came from nowhere, but that alongside The Texas Chain Saw Massacre there is a string of great and fascinating films onwards. About the end of his three picture deal with Cannon Films was when things wander into questionable paths. I like The Mangler (1995), but as a strange film born from a tale of a demonically possessed industrial clothing press, and by Crocodile (2000) you get a film there which feels like something is lost least for that production.

Even Crocodile has emotional attachment for me, simply as the last film I saw with my older brother before he moved to Australia, but it is still a proto-Asylum Picture production with a lack of spark, feeling the sense any could have helmed it. Other films in the period beforehand however are far more interesting. The Mangler is a misfire, but a gloriously weird one. Spontaneous Combustion, the subject of today's review, has always stood out but it has the stranger aspect that one of its most vocal fans is Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the acclaimed Japanese filmmaker who has worked in a variety of genres in cinema and is critically acclaimed. Amongst that acclaim is that he has also left a lasting mark in horror cinema between Cure (1997) and Pulse (2001). Kurosawa has described his interest in this later Hooper film alongside Lifeforce (1985), one of the more infamous films in Hooper's career as a highly ambition science fiction horror tale from Cannon Films which is divisive¹. To think that the alien mood Spontaneous Combustion has influenced Cure is something to be amazed by.

Why I love Hooper is that, whilst his work can vary in content, he still belongs in a group of directors with a clear author's flourish on his movies, that everyone creeps with the sense of the deranged. Most of his films are mad and crazed, heightened to the point that barring a few quiet moments they feel like his creations. Even Poltergeist has this maniacal air when trees and clowns terrorise a suburbia family, which is why I waver on the notion of Steven Spielberg being its secret director. Hooper's career is full of heightened figures and moments to emphasis this - the late Gunnar Hansen running around in slapped on makeup and a chainsaw, a coked up Dennis Hooper welding two, carnival freak shows of two-headed sheep, Bill Mosley as a steel head plated Vietnam vet shouting about "Narmland" - that it even infects a sombre film in his filmography like Salem's Lot (1978) with James Mason, films like the later gaining a fascinating contrast as well for their tonal differences.

Spontaneous Combustion starts off very different, a cold and very sombre piece, catching a viewer off-guard with its atmospheric dark synth music contrasted to jets of real flame being projected over a black screen between nuke green opening credits. In the fifties, a man and a woman are test subjects for surviving a nuke being dropped within a bomb shelter, through a test anti-radiation vaccine, only for the officials behind it to be mystified when they have conceived a child whilst there. The parents in a freak incident burn to death due to spontaneous human combustion, a curious real life phenomenon of people randomly being set on fire from the inside of their bodies, leaving their newborn son as an orphan who grows up as Brad Dourif. Dourif is the best thing in the film, bringing a level of gravitas to the point it is sad that he started in films like One Flew Over a Cuckoo's Nest (1975) only to become marginalised. He takes this film so seriously that when the film does slowly morph into the frenzy of Hooper's other work, he reins it in.

Dourif to his horror continually finds out people he has rage or arguments with suddenly die of spontaneous combustion, not a long time after seeing a hole burst out of his forearm spitting fire and his girlfriend hiding knowledge behind his back becoming aware that something is amiss.  The coolness of the tone makes the film atmospherically at ill ease at first, coldness just about the entire the terrain of David Cronenberg and a touch of a conspiracy thriller. The fact the film is looking back to fifties anxieties of nuclear power, by way of just leaving the eighties when that fear resurfaced, cannot be ignored. Born on August 6th, the day the a-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, his conception is in the middle of 1955 in Nevada and a bomb testing sight. The ultimate nuclear family, the film has enough budget to credibly parody old fifties newsreels, with his parents Brian and Peggy the ultimate fifties icons of the American pie family without becoming too tongue-in-check and missing the satrical point. Set during a time in the then-modern day where there is a modern nuclear power plant being built in the setting, the Trinidad Beach nuclear power plant, and people like Dourif's lead wearing anti-nuclear black armbands, the film is not profound in its message, but evoking the period's concerns is still strongly felt throughout.

Halfway through Hooper's film follows a suspension of disbelief that is similar to Italian genre movie logic, taking fifties atomic man film and updating for the excess of the late eighties. Due to the aspects of nuclear energy and an anti-radiation vaccine given to his parents, Dourif can set people on fire from the inside with his mind and spurts miniature volcanoes of flame which destroy his body. All around him a conspiracy plays out with people wanting to dispose of him and neon green fluid in needles like reanimating fluid being welded around, slowly becoming more pulpy and energised with an intensity the more physically damaged Dourif is, his acting making sure a film which dissipates in its seriousness still works the further it goes along. The film's drift to being more absurd is not a bad thing in hindsight, especially as Hooper by this point mad far more openly humorous films and was not above intentional silliness. You do not have a cameo with legendary cult director John Landis, name recognition in horror circles where he plays a character who is set alight as a bonfire, without knowing the tonal shift that results.

Everything is excessive as was the case of Hooper's career in his best films. Not only do you have dark synth music, but a Latin singing choir straight out of The Omen (1976) blasting away, which may be ridiculous in context but for myself actually adding a sobering sense of seriousness even to a film which eventually becomes more of a b-movie in its tone. (Whilst not a recognisable name, the composer Graeme Revell is a journeyman who, if you saw mainstream films and television between the nineties to the modern day, you the reader have likely encountered at some point without realising it). Huge portions are lit in bright neon or artificial lighting to the point even a phone is built to radiate neon pink from a transparent case, all disarming and, even if closer to ­Hooper's visual excesses of the era, still presents an alarming tone which raises the film's qualities. More so as in high sight, the film if it has any problems is entirely with the swiftness, and resulting messy nature, to how quickly it tidies up its conclusion. It feels rushed, and suffering from its low budget when it needed more time to breathe. The mood and the attitude Hooper brings to the table is Spontaneous Combustion's greatest success alongside key collaborators within the film. Seeing the film, and scenes such as Dourif  in the middle of a checker board tiled corridor, stark neon blue lighting and permanently with smoke coming from wounds in his body, this film whilst note a key work to immediately see from the director is still striking enough to be worthy of his filmography. The Kiyoshi Kurosawa connection also emphasises now the film as worthy for historical recognition as, alongside being an entertaining if flawed b-movie, I can now see the same attitudes in look and mood Kurosawa took as influence to make even greater films, as meaningful badge of honour to any film to have.

 

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1) Perfectly summing his interest, which I will link to HERE, is an article of Kurosawa creating double bills around his own filmography.