Thursday, April 7, 2016

Steven Spielberg, part XVIII: Spyder, spyder, burning bright


At the halfway mark of our Steven Spielberg retrospective, we consider his influence upon the industry not only as a director but as a businessman; although, if we're honest with ourselves, we're mainly in it for the GODDAM SPIDER.

Directed by Frank Marshall
Written by Don Jakoby, Al Williams, and Wesley Strick
With Jeff Daniels (Dr. Ross Jennings), Harley Jane Kozak (Molly Jennings), Dr. James Atherton (Julian Sands), Mark L. Taylor (Jerry Manley), Henry Jones (Dr. Sam Metcalf), Stuart Pankin (Sheriff Lloyd Parsons), and John Goodman (Delbert McClintock)

Spoiler alert: moderate

Over the course of this director's retrospective, we have—by necessity—tip-toed around Steven Spielberg's prodigious career as a film producer.  But there was always bound to come a time when that aspect of his Hollywood tenure had to be more completely acknowledged, and the beginning of the 20th century's last decade seems like the appropriate place.  You see, by the summer of 1990, he'd produced no fewer than 29 movies—the exact same number of theatrically-released feature-length films that he has, as of April 8th, 2016, directed for himself.  The bulk of them fell under the aegis of his production company, Amblin Entertainment, named after a short film he'd directed many years before.  About a third had been his own movies.  The other two thirds had been projects by other directors, and their number is dominated by luminaries.  It includes Joe Dante, who broke big when Amblin produced his fifth film, Gremlins.  It includes Don Bluth, that refugee from Disney, who founded his own animation studio and partnered with Amblin for An American Tail and The Land Before Time—Spielberg's first movie about the Jewish Experience and Spielberg's first romp with dinosaurs, respectively. (Sadly, however, both films are likely rather worse than you remember, especially Tail.)  The list even includes Akira Kurosawa, who had his third-to-last film funded by Amblin.

And, obviously, no roll call of Spielberg's talented partners would be complete without mentioning the most talented one of all—but, of course, since he's the subject of our other ongoing director's retrospective, we scarcely need belabor the works of Robert Zemeckis here.

Whoa!  Did I just imply that Zemeckis is a more valuable filmmaker than the deified Kurosawa?  Well, that's a very complicated question.  The answer is yes.

Generally speaking, anybody that Spielberg decided was worth his time, attention, and money is worth ours.  It's not the strictest rule; right or wrong, nobody cares about the guy who directed The Money Pit.  And, as Spielberg's personal investment in each project waned, the Spielberg seal of quality tarnished, until, eventually, Transformers.

But, back in 1990, we didn't need to worry about that yet; and presently we find ourselves face-to-face with the 29th feature Spielberg helped produce, and which was directed by one of Amblin's co-founders—Frank Marshall.  (The other, of course, was Kathleen Kennedy.)  Not merely a veteran producer, Marshall had served as Amblin's most stalwart second unit director, as well, working on no fewer than six of Spielberg's films—including all three Indiana Jones movies—and two Zemeckis joints, to boot.

Not bad work if you can get it!  And yet by the end of the 1980s, the man wanted to see his name listed last on the poster (preferably on one of the best posters ever drawn!), and, in 1990, he got his chance.  He was as experienced a first-time director as you could possibly hope for; still, when you're friends with Steven Spielberg, help's just a phone call away.  So, without wishing to denigrate its credited director in the slightest way, Spielberg became involved intimately in Marshall's film—perhaps not to the same extent as The Goonies, but enough that every source available lists him as Marshall's second unit director—a cryptic switcheroo if there ever was one.  What, then, was Spielberg's final contribution?  I have no idea.  However, if I needed an excuse to put Marshall's directorial debut, Arachnophobia, into my Spielberg retrospective, well—there it is.

Of course, the real reasons we're talking Arachnophobia are as follows:
1)I own Arachnophobia.
2)I love Arachnophobia.

Now, I also hate Arachnophobia—but that just goes to show what a swell movie Marshall and Spielberg made.  It is unbearably enjoyable: I squirm and scream and laugh nervously all the way through the fucking thing.  It's a deeply underrated movie, I'd say, regarded warmly when it's mentioned, but hardly ever held up as a classic of its form, whether that form be "movies about gross arthropods" or "PG-13 horror," although I assert that it is a classic of both.  Yet I nevertheless recognize that the quality one perceives in Arachnophobia has everything to do with whether one shares the film's titular condition.  I do.  Thus, for me, Arachnophobia is an acutely terrifying blast.

We begin our tale in the jungles of Venezuela.  Here we find Dr. Atherton, an entomologist, and his photographer, Manley.  We quickly learn that Manley has no business being here—aside from the nasty fever he's picked up, he's also scared of everything he sees.  Naturally, Atherton soon stops paying attention to his whining; he's far too interested in the fascinating new species of giant spider they've discovered in an ecologically-isolated sinkhole.  But this means nobody's watching when one of those spiders bites Manley and kills him.  Attributing his death to the fever, Atherton sends his corpse back to America—specifically, Canaima, CA—and, unbeknownst to him, that spider tags along.

So we turn to the small California town's newest living inhabitants—Ross and Molly Jennings and their two unimportant children.  Ross is a doctor, and shall be our hero—although in no sense should we consider him the primary driver of the plot.  In fact, Ross has been dragged to his new home against his better judgment (I can relate).  Molly, tired of the hustle and bustle of San Francisco, has finally convinced him to move to the sticks.  And they'd probably be just fine, but, as Ross ineffectually attempts to integrate himself into a community that he kind of despises, that spider's been busy making itself feel at home, too—by setting up its nest in the Jennings' basement.

And did we mention that Ross has... wait for it... arachnophobia?

Our spider, however, is different than the usual brand of arachnoid menace: its species operates not merely as lone predators, but organizes itself on the basis of a hive, complete with swarms of soldier spiders that it sends out to explore, to obtain food, and—as becomes quite apparent—to murder human beings for the sheer hell of it, for it is not so much a biologically-plausible organism than it is a horrifying avatar of the Evil of the Natural World.  Ross clues in early, and, like so many reasonable men before him, has a devil of a time convincing the authorities he's right.  But once he does, it's up to him, a returning Dr. Atherton, and the town's herculean exterminator, Delbert McClintock, to rid Canaima of this lethal infestation.  It all ends in a fiery showdown in the cellar, where the daddy of all spiders awaits its nemesis, the man who's terrified of it.

To get the obvious out of the way, it's Jaws on Land, from its basic premise of a small town besieged by deadly natural forces, to its fraidy-cat big-city-transplant hero, to its efforts to mythologize the adversary until it becomes less like an animal and more like a cruel demigod who's taken on an animal's form.  And, naturally, the camera stalks victims from the spiders' eyes; and we both see and do not see the arachnids, depending upon which Marshall believes shall be the most apt to tingle our spines.  Nevertheless, Jaws on Land already sort of means "it's not that much like Jaws at all," and thus one could easily go too far with the comparisons if one doesn't acknowledge that really big contrast first.

Still, it's a very Spielbergian movie: Arachnophobia's DP Mikael Salomon had just finished Always before jumping onto Arachnophobia, and both seem to be deeply invested in the  idea of "copying Allen Daviau"—to the extent that a lot of the cramped angles necessary to showcase the legion of spiders have analogues in the low-angle shooting style of E.T.  (And an even clearer connection can be found in Salomon's use of an almost unnaturally warm lighting scheme in Arachnophobia's domestic spaces, making them seem a lot safer than the plot's ever going to let them be.)  Overall, Arachnophobia's a terribly handsome film; even then, however, its cinematographer is not the best craftsman on Marshall's team.  That would be its editor.

So just whom do we find in the editing room?  No less than the indefatigable Michael Kahn himself.  He'd worked with Spielberg ten times already, and therefore Marshall's film—driven completely by Kahn's characteristically relentless sense of timing—was always bound to take the shape of the film Spielberg might have made in his place, even if by 1990 Spielberg didn't seem quite as interested in awesome creature features as he was fifteen years earlier.

And that goes double if they didn't have dinosaurs.

Yet, as a creature feature, Arachnophobia is one of the purest strains you'll ever see (once again reflecting the influence of Jaws, but now in the best possible way).  The  film was sold to public, however, as what its marketers coined a "thrillomedy"—and that hateful word, perhaps because of its very insipidity, has left a deep and lasting impression upon my mind, so that no matter how many times I watch Arachnophobia, I'll always eventually wind up remembering it as a movie possessed of an obnoxiously jokey tone.

But that isn't the case at all!  Although Marshall goes about his business of killing the residents of Canaima with way too much obvious glee for Arachnophobia to ever be described as "dour," the film only ever dips its toes into anything that would make you call it a "comedy."  When it's actively trying to be funny, it's largely through Jeff Daniels' line reads—and the only unambiguously comic character is John Goodman's cartoon answer to Sam Quint, Delbert the Exterminator.  Plainly, Delbert ought to be mildly intolerable; and his comic autism and gung-ho attitude frankly do appear to have arrived from the set of another, stupider movie.

Possibly a poorly-cast live-action version of King of the Hill.

But Marshall restrains Goodman, or Goodman restrains himself, and either way the director keeps the trigger-happy exterminator's screentime to the barest minimum.  As a result, Goodman's weird energy winds up an actual pleasure—he is merely the most vivid addition to the collection of quickly-sketched characters who constitute the town.  (Indeed, if Arachnophobia is like a Spielberg movie, it's even more like a John Carpenter movie.)  So, while Arachnophobia clearly aims to amuse—particularly as its first act idles in sitcom mode—it only occasionally intends to wring any real gut-busting laughs from its scenario, typically treating it precisely as gravely as it deserves.  Indeed, the very worst moment of the film—a joke about a dad walking in on his daughter and seeing her tits, coming less than a minute after the film's most deliberately disconcerting image, a spider crawling down her cleavage and across her belly—still winds up underplayed.  And thank God for that.  Marshall's adamant refusal to actually make a "thrillomedy" out of the material does him infinite credit: a goofy Arachnophobia would be a far less effective Arachnophobia.  And, whatever other adjective you want to throw its way—derivative, exploitative, unbelievable—Arachnophobia surely remains effective.

Why, it would almost have to be.  The real strength of Arachnophobia—its selling point, its miracle, and the near Roar-level sense of danger it conjures for its poor, put-upon cast—is its deployment of hundreds of real spiders, led by a monstrous trained tarantula, its abdomen extended by proesthetics, and named "Big Bob," after Zemeckis, presumably because Marshall hated him.

Thus Arachnophobia represents one of the most impeccable examples of animal wrangling in cinema.  The spiders always had to do the right thing, whether that was creeping around an old woman, menacing Jeff Daniels, or swarming through the cracks in a door.  It is therefore something of a happy accident that Arachnophobia winds up even as well-acted as it is: after all, the takes Marshall used were always the ones where the spiders got it right, and despite all the techniques used to push the spiders one way or another, the spiders almost never got it right, so if the spiders did get it right, then it was time to move on to the next scene—end of discussion.  They say that no spiders died on the set of Arachnophobia, and while I find this both hard to believe and impossible to care about either way—spiders being, to my mind, the enemies of all mankind—this privileging of the animal actors over the humans was certainly the right move. After all, which are we likely to be more invested in?  The performances of Arachnophobia's victims?  Or the uncanny, horrifying movements of the spiders across Marshall's frame?

It's a rhetorical question.

Arachnophobia is not beyond criticism, clearly: it's certainly the case that, for most of the film's running time, Marshall demonstrates only that one single trick (spiders sneaking up on unsuspecting victims), and by the hour and a half mark, his variations on this trick are just about starting wearing thin—though by the time we actually arrive at the potential for diminishing returns, he kicks it up one more notch, by having a spider crawl out of a corpse's nose.  It helps, too, that the trick is a really, really good one—thus the impression you're left with, by the time we barrel into the climax, is that Marshall (and Michael Kahn) have put together a movie that is one heart-stopping scene of bug-driven terror after another.

Oh, but that climax is a different beast entirely: beginning with an absolute army of spiders, it ends up in a showdown that takes Arachnophobia beyond the expected thrills of its genre, and right into the realm of the unforgettable.  Truth be told, it's Arachnophobia's most sustained dance with outright ridiculousness—but I wouldn't trade Daniels' crazed battle with the king spider for just about anything, even if I do faintly wish that the Law of 1990 did not require him to utter a few action hero quips in the process.  (It's redeemed completely with the film's final gesture anyway: both its funniest moment and its cutest.)

Arachnophobia, I admit, is a movie with positively nothing on its mind but spiders, that cribs from other movies, and is even kind of repetitive; not necessarily the ripest subject for a 2500 word review.  Yet "a movie with nothing on its mind but spiders," that's also as expertly-made as this one, is sometimes exactly the movie you need.  As a machine built for the purpose of making you twitch, it not only delivers beyond any reasonable expectation—it's damn near flawless.  I have no hesitation in calling it one of Spielberg's best Amblin films—for outside of Spielberg and Zemeckis' own directorial efforts, it might well be the best Amblin film—and it suggests that there was some kind of greatness within old Frank Marshall, too.

Unfortunately—or quite happily, depending upon your point of view and what kind of movies you value—Marshall's subsequent career would nosedive quickly.  He would go on to direct only four more films.  The next, his true story of survival, Alive, is rather decent.  His third, however, represented an effort to move beyond Amblin—though, apparently, not so far as to avoid adapting a Michael Crichton novel and, hopefully, riding that Jurassic Park wave.  This, of course, was 1995's Congo; and Congo, as I'm sure you know, is just about the best worst movie ever made, an enormous and flabbergasting waste of studio resources that you're bound to laugh at, pretty much all the way through.  Well, you can never tell what will end a man's career in Hollywood, but at least Marshall's Arachnophobia shall always be with us, a half-buried reminder of the time he once made something truly wonderful—glittering like a diamond, or like the eight firelit eyes of an enormous animatronic tarantula puppet, that's exactly two seconds away from pouncing on Jeff Daniels' face.

Score:  10/10


  1. You must have a camera in my apartment, because I watched both Arachnophobia AND a Kurosawa recently (Rashomon). And I must say, I agree with your pro-Zemeckis assessment vis-a-vis Kurosawa.

    I wouldn't say I'm QUITE so enamored as Arachnophobia as you, because the structure was very very intimately familiar to me so it felt a little rote, but damn is it a blast.

    1. It's an idiosyncratically "perfect" film, I realize.

      Rashomon would be one of the ones I'd hang a argument about Kurosawa being worthy of the overpraise, though, along with Yojimbo and Sanjuro and (the first half of) of High and Low, all of which are either flawless or nearly flawless or so inventively different that they'd deserve very, very high mark, especially Sanjuro. And The Bad Sleep Well is really good, too. Everything else I've seen does not warrant the superlatives.

      Seven Samurai is so much better as The Magnificent Seven (which has more content yet is somehow an hour shorter) that it takes away a lot of that film's magic. Stray Dog is fine, but nothing to write home about. Kagemusha is a fable that takes three hours to play out, and is kind of mediocre. Throne of Blood has its moments, but is overall an extremely pacey adaptation of Macbeth. And Hidden Fortress, that alleged classic, is outright bad and also extremely, extremely fucking gross. (I think I wrote about it in passing, along the lines, "You know, I don't remember the part in Star Wars where R2D2 and C3PO tried to rape Princess Leia.")

      I do still need to watch Ikiru. Also somewhat keen on seeing I Live in Fear and Red Beard.