Mystery Train (1989)

 

Director: Jim Jarmusch

Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch

Cast: Masatoshi Nagase as Jun, Youki Kudoh as Mitsuko, Screamin' Jay Hawkins as the Night Clerk, Cinqué Lee as the Bellboy, Jodie Markell as Sun Studio Guide, Nicoletta Braschi as Luisa, Elizabeth Bracco as Dee Dee, Sy Richardson as the Newsvendor, Tom Noonan as the Man In Diner, Joe Strummer as Johnny "Elvis", Rick Aviles as Will Robinson, Steve Buscemi as Charlie, Vondie Curtis-Hall as Ed, Tom Waits as the Radio D.J.

Canon Fodder

 

His name is Dave.

An anthology produced with backing from JVC, the Japanese electronics company did work in multiple mediums such as video games to anime, so this is not an alien concept to them alongside their main form of business, including their legacy in televisions and videotape recorders. Thankfully, among their investments was also Jim Jarmusch's 1989 tribute to Memphis and its music, the beginning of his series of anthologies over these years such as Night on Earth (1991) to compiling the Coffee and Cigarettes films started in 1986 into one film from 2003.

Mystery Train really is not a film about a dramatic plot, instead three interconnecting mood pieces, with the first absolutely setting up this greater emphasis away from dramatic tension as there is none, only the adventures of a young man and woman from Yokohama in Japan. They do argue whether Elvis Presley or Carl Perkins was better, but are a loving couple. They are tourists out of their element, star struck by the home of their favourite music, without any cheap jokes at their expense; even the later presentations of this film through Criterion went further to fix issues in the past with the subtitles for their dialogue, mostly in Japanese, which prevented viewers from knowing everything they say. They say a lot, as loving music fans who wonder the real locations of Memphis, including a confused tour of Sun Records, with a language barrier, a leather jacket between them on her, and their large red luggage case being carried by the pair on a giant wooden pole. Both of the actors, Masatoshi Nagase as Jun and Youki Kudoh as Mitsuko, stand out with personality, both with prolific careers after this. There is also the added delight that, looking the part for a youthful rockabilly here or a Wong Kar-Wai protagonist, Masatoshi Nagase became grizzled as he got older and starred, in just one year, in Sion Sono's Suicide Club (2001), Gakuryū Ishii's Electric Dragon 80.000 V (2001), and Seijun Suzuki's Pistol Opera (2001), three of the most idiosyncratic Japanese filmmakers at their most idiosyncratic and interesting.

Their story is entirely about two people talking and bonding, some arguing and the cool trick of using a lighter with your feet being demonstrated. To be honest, Jarmusch's tone for many of his films, whether a good comparison for some or not, is closer to Quentin Tarantino's throughout his career, extensive conversation from characters about their obsessions, only with the emphasis on Jarmusch further from cinema to an entire spectrum of tangents, from Jack and Meg White of the White Stripes being obsessed over a Tesla Coil in Coffee and Cigarettes to Mystery Train having a tangent over one of the characters being named Will Robinson, after the Lost in Space television series, which he dismisses as dumb white people being stuck on an asteroid. Though Jarmusch has dabbled in more overt plots too - Dead Man (1995), Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) - another factor to his career, unlike Tarantino, is a more warm and humane tone, where even when it comes to his horror film Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), it is more about bonding over awesome old LPs and character dynamics with the horror coming unexpectedly, even as a punch line for sick humoured gags. The Limits of Control (2009), his drone metal scored assassin narrative, plays like a pastiche but not in an ironic way, and with Mystery Train, though a gun is set off at two points, it feels entirely like an empathetic ode to these characters obsessed with culture of all kinds.

Thankfully, Jarmusch has always been able to make likable characters, the first act's outsiders who go along without unnecessary contrivances against their expense. They also set up the central hub to all the scenes, as they are the first to enter the hotel everyone in the three stories reach, where you have Cinqué Lee, Spike Lee's brother, as the bellhop, and legendary proto-shock rock musician and singer Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, in an incredible red suit, as the hotel manager. When not eating a Japanese plum, these two are in the centre as a Greek chorus to all the other stories. This includes a grieving Italian widow Luisa (Nicoletta Braschi), travelling to Rome with her husband's casket, in a story where she is able to overcome this in spite of this. This involves Tom Noonan, being very creepy, talking about encountering the ghost of 1956 Elvis in the night, forced to flee him but encountering another woman lost also by herself to share a hotel room with. For the third story tension does come in, but with a comedic edge, involving Joe Strummer of The Clash, the legendary punk band. By this point, Strummer had disbanded the band in 1986 after the infamous Cut the Crap (1985) album, compelling to listen to as a strange mix of football chanting, layered audio and cheap synth beats, but understandably a misfire of big proportions even as someone who found songs likable on it. It was the ill-advised decision by Strummer to have key members of the band forced out the band, replace them and attempt to return to their roots without doing so at all. He would move onto solo projects and also start a film career, such as here or with Doctor Chance (1997) by F.J. Ossang, a French film maker whose films I wish was more readily available, where he has a small cameo talking about his gonads. Strummer is Johnny, or Elvis as everyone calls him due to a passing similarity, an English ex-pat who has lost his wife and job. Drunk, and with a loaded gun, his brother-in-law as portrayed by Steve Buscemi, continuing a career here of always getting the worst luck, having to be brought in with Will Robinson (Rick Aviles) to stop him doing mischief. "Elvis", due to one racist liquor seller later, does end up firing the gun and they find themselves hiding in the hotel as a trio, stuck talking in one of the rooms about the fact there should be a Malcolm X suite instead of Elvis photos everywhere.

Mystery Train is not a dramatic, plot driven film even by this point, and this is factoring in that the real ghost of Elvis Presley accidentally appears in a hotel room for a cameo. Mystery Train is about the characters in place, not forced to move for the sake of drama but allowed to breathe, Jarmusch liking to write extensive dialogue between them hanging out. His cinema is not as overt as Tarantino's in being post-modern or self-reflective either, instead name checking his favourite things but Jarmusch still emphasising the characters existing in the pretence of narrative structures. They are characters with suggested lives, unlike early Pulp Fiction era Tarantino where they were absolutely archetypes. Set around one specific time period, with Tom Waits as the radio announcer's voice heard through all this, Memphis itself and the cultural heritage is as much the subject, the title of the film itself a song heard in both versions by Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins. A warm film, it nonetheless does also tackle some serious topics in this mood; the two covers of Mystery Train in itself two also name checks the issue of Elvis being placed as a white musician seen as appropriating black musicians' work and being easier to sell to white audiences, which is a subject of discussion alongside tensions of race occasionally raised in the film. Elvis himself is not demonised, but for a fond film, which is charming and sweet, it still nods to complexities which Jim Jarmusch has shown throughout his career, as it is using these three stories to create a work about Memphis as a place with its rich history just in terms of music, let alone the actual urban landscape as shown throughout.

Mystery Train has always been a film I admired, in mind that it is a film literally about nothing if you take a simple view of it - no consequences, even of firing a gun into someone, or two, are shown at all with an open ending to the third story. Nonetheless it does feel like an experience, lived in, enjoyed, with a few one liners which are hilarious, and it wins me over repeatedly every time I return to this film.

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)

 

Director: Dominique Othenin-Girard

Screenplay: Michael Jacobs, Dominique Othenin-Girard and Shem Bitterman

Cast: Donald Pleasence as Dr. Sam Loomis, Danielle Harris as Jamie Lloyd, Ellie Cornell as Rachel Carruthers, Don Shanks as Michael Myers, Wendy Kaplan as Tina Williams

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Around Part 5, and you begin to see the cracks start to appear in the Halloween franchise even if I found entertainment within this film over Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988). By this point in a franchise, sequels are inherently a nightmare as a concept as producers would like to continue their franchises but logic is stretched as to why to continue with the same characters and tropes as before. With Halloween, whilst it should have done this after the first film immediately, there was the idea to make an anthology series in feature length form with Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) which could have made more sense.  Instead, as it stayed with Michael Myers, yes there is an iconic villain and so much iconic aspects of the original film that were already lingering in consciousness by this point, as they are returned to as audio and visual motifs, but you are also finding yourself in the shadow of the first film, a herculean task especially as this attempt to change the series, as this "Thorn" trilogy, would lead to the next film only appearing five years later and through Miramax. Before it even reaches this point, this franchise also fully embraced the slasher genre's cheesier side, not inherently an issue for me at now, but at the time when the original version of the slasher genre was petering out fully.

With fully spoilers, Michael Myers survived the last film, again terrorizing Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris) again, but with the end of that film leading to a "curse" being transferred to his niece, leaving her traumatised and having to be kept in a special children's hospital with Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) watching on. By this point we have fully entered the supernatural, with Jamie having a psychic link to her uncle, but we have at least a credible new turn of a traumatised child having to live under the shadow of her uncle's acts, more so as, for all the cheese in this, Harris as a child actor here is good and the thing you can legitimately credit as a real virtue to the piece. Beyond her performance however, this is the kind of slasher that, fun, does lose the veneer of its original John Carpenter version fully, where to recuperate from the last film it seemingly suggests Myers slept in a cabin on the same bed for an entire year until the next Halloween.

For those who enjoy these types of films, even if the wheels are falling off the wagon, this definitely has more spark than The Return of Michael Myers, having a more absurd edge to enjoy. The idea of what was originally a realistic film about a killer with a knife becoming more and more supernatural - Season of the Witch (1982) notwithstanding - is exceptionally strange as this series of viewings have gone on, to think that to literalize the bogeyman the productions had to eventually reach this point, especially with the amount of injuries he took and managed to survive at this entry. Eventually you would need to pull back as in a harsh reverse to this progression when, as this Thorn trilogy, a metaphorical take of Myers as a psychological threat that Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) would go back to where the franchise started. It does not end up where Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (1993) went though, where you need a relative of Jason Voorhees with a magical fantasy sword now to kill him, the psychic link a simple McGuffin to a vicious movie, one which manages to get away with a young girl being terrorised by an adult, even trying to run her over in a car at one point, and depicting it with teeth even there is now a more unintentionally ridiculous edge to everything. You do also have cartoon sound effects over two bumbling comedy police characters, and this is where we are entirely dealing in pure gouda cheese. All the eighties suddenly ploughs in with the music alone throughout the film, and notwithstanding the opening, with heavy editing cuts and all those wasted pumpkins in the credits, this is fully removed from the style of the first three films baring the recreations of iconic sound and visual motifs.

Even if you have a prolonged and moody set piece in an barn at a Halloween party, one upping the cat jump scare from horror with a kitten, you see the tears with this franchise in that Michael Myers is such a simplistic fear, a single minded killer with a knife, that you are struggling to try to add more to him. Unlike A Nightmare on Elm Street where all possibilities are opened by the premise, having to retain a franchise this simple in premise means you strain at the restrictions and repeat the beats from the films before, leaving me with utter sympathy for someone like the director/co-writer Dominique Othenin-Girard, a Swiss-French filmmaker who before this made After Darkness (1985), a Swiss horror film starring John Hurt which was his sole feature beforehand and likely caught enough interest from Halloween's producer to hire him. The psychic subplot does feel unexpected, fully immerging as some form of symbol of Jamie's relation to her uncle, taking an extreme with the idea of inheriting his bloodline, the horrible reputation of his crimes like a real life family of a murderer, whilst giving an excuse for creepy POV shots. It does however feel underutilised and, even for an opening minded person with mysticism, they would suspend disbelief at how easily the police follow leads from a young girl's psychic visions when Myers does come to town again. Everything involving a faceless man in iron toed heels, so evil he punts a small dog to the side, is a bizarre decision to try to sustain the series when you have hindsight; that after it finishes with shocking the viewer with mayhem and a jailhouse on fire, this sequel did so bad at the box office it took six years for the next film in the series, with another company, to be made, dampening this intentional rug pull.

Then there is the most controversial aspect, Donald Pleasance's performance as Dr. Loomis as a man who fully loses his mind and spends most of his time screaming at a young girl to help him like a madman. It is either an apt depiction of him breaking down, desperate to end Myers, or the biggest slice of bowl of ham acting you will ever see. This time around watching the film, it is hammy but makes perfect sense, another of the virtues as by this point, half burnt, and physically and mentally scarred, I would imagine Dr. Loomis just on a frayed strand of sanity which would easily snap if more death transpired, the Ahab comparison from Herman Melville's Moby Dick apt as by this point, he looks like he would sacrifice people to finally sort of his foe.

The unintentional humour and decisions really start to make their way into this series by this point, which is a sign of the scars and struggle of keeping this series aloft really showing, and I admit right from the get-go, we have had sequences involving a piece of Stonehenge being stolen and a hot tub with a scalding temperature mode on the dials in the previous films, so I accept absurdity was here from earlier. Here though you see the series changing its aesthetic entirely and being entirely able to amplify these absurdist edges; the comedic cops are this, and the soundtrack betrays, whilst charmingly of its era like the Romeo Romeo song, that this has become like its brethren in the slasher genre than the one slasher film from 1976 which seemingly sat on a podium higher than most. You also cannot deny too that, with Myers suddenly having a Samhain tattoo on his wrist, the moment your franchise is crow barring a cultist back-story set-up into the franchise, you are in trajectory for it to fail, especially as even if we finally got the final of this trilogy in the franchise, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) notoriously came in a drastically butchered form.

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers opened to $5.1 million, with a gross of $11.6 million off a $5 million budget which would prove to be the lowest for the series so far in the franchise¹. It would lead to Miramax and their Dimension Films label. Long before we realised Harvey Weinstein was a terrible human being, we only presumed our grievances with Miramax was how films were treated. The horrible truths learnt of his behaviour are too uncomfortably real to have as a tangent in a review of a goofy slasher sequel, so we will stick to the fact that Miramax, for all the acclaimed films in their back catalogue, were terrible for tampering with films, especially those they licensed in genres like martial arts cinema. Whilst from the Dimension Films label, we can also add The Revenge of Michael Myers, which infamously has a theatrical cut which is a legitimate mess to witness, and a Producer's Cut which finally surfaced which managed to salvage some good will from fans of the franchise. The later sadly only came long after the Thorn trilogy in the Halloween series ended, thus closing off this timeline broken and all it's set up in this film obliterated from whatever promise it had.

This leaves Part 5 too in a really peculiar place; it is absolutely a more interesting film to watch than Part 4, entirely just from a fun slasher side, but we are dealing with a series of films, truthfully, finding themselves drifting into a period after the Golden Age of Slasher films, no longer a trend setter for the genre but also not even in the era where they were huge. The nineties is an idiosyncratic time for horror films in general, but Scream in 1996, when it help usher the slasher film back, did so with a change in tone for the new decade, changing the tone and/or simply the aesthetic choices as per what was trendy at the time. It is funny for me that 1989, the year of my birth, signalled the time in horror, just as the nineties were to change the template for this cinema, where the slashers were to fade back, with the three big titles in this genre all showing up in that year. I came to be in the year the three heavy hitters of this genre came with some of their weakest efforts, even if they all have their fun virtues is you ignore the need for them to be "great". A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child is not the worse for me in the franchise, but certainly a law of diminishing returns, and Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan was the last of the Paramount era of the franchise, infamous for promising to be set in New York City but mostly set on a boat and in Canada. They are a trilogy of entertaining films, but the strain of the need of a sequel is felt through them all, and The Revenge of Michael Myers is no different whatsoever.

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1) The 40-Year History of Halloween at the Box Office, written by Chris Eggertsen for Box Office Pro, published October 14th 2022.