chiller blog

Posted Jan 28, 09 10:25 AM

You Meet the Strangest People in the Strangest Places

I Netflixed Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering.

Hey, I’m a perennial sucker for giving virtually any attempt at horror a chance. This one offered the morbid curiosity of co-starring Karen Black, one-time A-lister and Academy Award nominee (opposite Jack Nicholson in the 1970 classic Five Easy Pieces). Fast-forward beyond undistinguished and unlucky career projects to straight-to-video sequels circa 1994. Here, Ms. Black is quite effective as a woman whose house-bound fears isolate her… before the messy material mandates typical execution by farm machinery. Karen Black was also really good in another low-budgeter, Curse of the 49er – that is, before some resurrected serial killer/death machine miner roasts her alive, sending her stunt double crashing off a break-away railing of some cheap cabin backdrop.

But amidst the sad industry fall on display in Children of the Corn IV, there is one graceful revelation. Do you know – my goodess --who plays the lead??? It’s NAOMI WATTS!!!

Naomi Watts. Before The Ring. Before Mulholland Drive, 21 Grams and King Kong. I mean, I knew the industry had been cherry-picking Australians from Mel Gibson to Nicole Kidman to Hugh Jackman. But Watts’ stateside debut seems more like minefield navigation than “cut your teeth” credit. And to her credit, Watts comes off in a bubble, creating a genuine woman where a rough afterthought scribble of a character existed. It reminds me of seeing Leonardo DiCaprio onscreen for the first time… in Critters 3.

That’s correct-o. In between TV’s Growing Pains and his watershed one-two punch of the shattering This Boy’s Life and the new classic What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, DiCaprio co-starred in the 1991 straight-to-video sequel. Certainly, it’s no prestige title on a resume, and one can fathom why agents and publicists spin to overlook it. But work is work and putting the film together meant something for those behind it. Actors starting out rely on exposure and meeting annual earnings to qualify for SAG insurance while paying for a life for themselves. So while teeth-bearing furballs descend on the residents of an apartment building – played for low-road laughs, making punctuations of gore unsettling – a very young DiCaprio (14?) reveals intrinsic instincts and pearl-like talent.

Watts and DiCaprio aren’t alone, and DiCaprio not even in this franchise. Critters 4 had Angela Bassett, smack between her career-making turns in Malcolm X and What’s Love Got to Do With It. It’s toxic and snide to deride a skilled performer’s early (and late) credits, but to do so is a what-reality-are-you-living-in injustice. Actors – especially those just starting out – fight to maintain their profession as their lone source of income. That can translate as optimal career strategy being back-burnered in necessity of the first, best and sometimes only available offer in a given time window.

Examples? Let’s scratch the surface. It’s genre common knowledge that Steve McQueen began in The Blob, Tom Hanks in He Knows You’re Alone, and Johnny Depp in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Kevin Bacon was one of the original victims (famously getting a spear through his larynx) in Friday the 13th. But Renee Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey also double-teamed for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, and in hard times, Oscar winners Martin Landau and Jack Palance played escaped asylum inmates harassing a psychiatrist and his family in Alone in the Dark. Angela Lansbury (!) is Granny in Neil Jordan’s lyco-sexual fairy tale, The Company of Wolves, going so far as to do one scene you’d never imagine anyone named Angela Lansbury ever doing. Piper Laurie pops up in Dario Argento’s Trauma. Mickey Rooney plays the title role in Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker. The same year that he earned a richly-deserved Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor as a manic studio chief in Barton Fink, Michael Lerner was a marked victim in Omen IV: The Awakening.

Of course, a whole generation of moviegoers now know Jamie Lee Curtis as Lindsay Lohan’s mom in the Freaky Friday remake; the rest of us remember Curtis’s self-shrugged-off slasher foundation of Halloween, Prom Night (with The Naked Gun’s Leslie Nielsen!), Terror Train (with Oscar winner Ben Johnson!) and Halloween II. Sans stigma, Curtis would re-embrace her roots, though, appearing in Halloween: H20 (briefly opposite her one-time-scream-queen mom, Janet Leigh) and – to a lesser extent – Halloween: Resurrection.

The real separation, though, is commitment. Actors who are about the work, not the result, transform their genre turns with Lee Strasberg/Stella Adler/Sanford Meisner-trained investment. There are casts and casts of hopefuls whose names flash on the screen for a second, but if they are to be remembered, it is only for the sordid “how’d they get it” details of their own characters’ demise.

It’s the difference between flesh and blood and just the latter.