Strait-Jacket (1964)

Posted on September 21, 2011 at 5:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

From the late 50’s to the early 60’s, William Castle was on a roll, cranking out one B-picture after another, each generally tempering some classy and competent direction with shameless gimmickry. By early ’64, he was pulling back on the gimmicks, but that doesn’t mean that Strait-Jacket isn’t shameless. The film came in the wake of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), an unlikely horror film that resuscitated the careers of two Hollywood stars of the 30’s and 40’s, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Davis used that film’s success to launch a twilight career in the horror/suspense genre, with Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), The Nanny (1965) and The Anniversary (1968) for Hammer Films, and, later, Burnt Offerings (1976) and The Watcher in the Woods (1980). Crawford also relished being in the spotlight again, whatever the circumstances, and when Castle, a Baby Jane fan, arrived on bended knee with a script by Psycho author Robert Bloch, she accepted – so long as she ruled like a queen on the set. The result was Strait-Jacket, filmed in 1963, the year that saw the release of two William Castle films which were not horror. Strait-Jacket, a psychological thriller with plenty of shocks, would be a return to form for the director/producer/showman.

Lucy (Joan Crawford) examines a bust made in her honor by her daughter Carol (Diane Baker). The bust was actually modeled on the younger Crawford and from her personal collection.

Crawford plays Lucy Harbin, who, in the opening scene, returns home early from a trip, and discovers her husband (Lee Majors) in bed with another woman. While her young daughter Carol bears witness, Lucy grabs an axe and decapitates the two lovers, then continues chopping with all the dexterity of a female Paul Bunyan. A semi-psychedelic montage shows Lucy in the insane asylum – it’s necessary for the title, after all, to get Crawford into a strait-jacket, and she screams with gusto – before we flash forward twenty years later. A gray-haired Lucy heads back to her farm to stay with her brother and sister-in-law, as well as Carol, now a beautiful young woman and played by Diane Baker (Journey to the Center of the Earth). Carol, who sculpts as a hobby, is being courted by Michael (John Anthony Hayes), from a well-to-do family. As you might expect, Lucy’s arrival initiates ominous happenings: she sees severed heads lying beside her pillow at night, and is haunted by a child’s chilling nursery rhyme that no one else seems to hear. Increasingly unstable, Lucy – who covers her gray hair with a raven-black wig given her by Carol, and masks her face in makeup to cover her wrinkles – makes a touchy-feely pass at Michael in front of her daughter. Michael looks a bit uncomfortable.

Lucy (Joan Crawford) uses her record player to light a match.

An unwelcome visit by Dr. Anderson, from her old asylum, sends Lucy further off the deep end. (The doctor is played by Mitchell Cox, a board member of Pepsi-Cola, which Crawford, widow of Pepsi’s CEO, never failed to promote. A box of Pepsi soft drinks is prominently displayed in the kitchen.) When Dr. Anderson confronts Lucy alone, her meltdown is spectacular. First she turns on the record player full-blast, then she lights her cigarette by striking a match on the record, and within a minute she’s screaming hysterically at him. Dr. Anderson lingers about the farm, which proves a mistake when an unseen stalker decapitates him with an axe.

Leo (George Kennedy) inspects the pigs.

Carol suspects foul play when she realizes Dr. Anderson’s car has been parked at the house all evening, so, Norman Bates-style, she decides to cover up the crime by hiding the car. Leo (George Kennedy), a snoopy farmhand, takes advantage of the situation by stealing the car for himself; in the morning, Carol discovers him casually repainting it. She tries to fire him, but he knows he has too much dirt on the Harbin family to take a fall; he refuses to leave. Naturally, he’s not long for this world.

Lucy (Crawford), in hysterics, envisions her dressing room as another prison.

If you can see where this is all going, it’s because it’s all pretty damn obvious. Bloch’s screenplay might have been more effective in 1964; to a modern viewer, the central twist feels too mundane. The influence of both Henri Georges-Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955) and, of course, Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) began a wave of twist-filled thrillers, many of them coming from Hammer Studios and the pen of Jimmy Sangster. After you’ve seen a lot of these, it’s hard to watch Strait-Jacket without doubting the narrative you’re being handed, and to begin prematurely guessing the identity of the real killer. Ironically, Castle handled these feints better with 1961’s Homicidal, with its truly left-field twist – a film which owed its existence to Psycho. (Apparently, Bloch had no hard feelings about that.) Yet Strait-Jacket still has much to recommend it for the curious. Like Homicidal, the violence is surprisingly explicit – we see heads getting separated from their bodies, however bloodlessly. George Kennedy’s murder is particularly spooky, set in a darkly-lit slaughterhouse where pigs are hanging from hooks. Diane Baker and Joan Crawford make a convincing mother-daughter team (even if Crawford is playing a character about twenty years younger than she really was); both are strong actors, and Crawford chews the scenery like a pit bull. She’s best before she dons that ghastly wig, though a final speech – delivered as though she’s playing a completely different character – is ludicrous. Double bill this with her equally absurd Johnny Guitar (1954) for an evening of campy fun.

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The Bed Sitting Room (1969)

Posted on September 19, 2011 at 5:07 am by Jeff Kuykendall

It’s all a matter of tone. The Bed Sitting Room (1969) could be the bleakest nuclear apocalypse movie ever made. Its themes, characters, and incidents could be unbearably disturbing; and in many ways they still are. But the ideas are pressed through a filter, which reduces our story to a broad satire that, at times, resembles a dry-as-hell BBC sketch comedy series, and at other times a Looney Tunes cartoon. The Bed Sitting Room is nonetheless haunting, because although it’s a comedy, we know what’s really at stake. Which is everything: our society, our children, our world – us. What I am saying is that you will probably not burst into tears when the end credits roll. In fact, the minds behind this film have actively worked to prevent that. The poster should have boasted that ambiguous guarantee: “You’ll laugh until your sides hurt, which means there is a very good chance that you will not succumb to existential despair. Look! Look at the funny parrot and watch Dudley Moore transform into a cute little dog! We will all die in the end.”

Frank Thornton as "The BBC" delivers the news to an audience of one.

Though it’s ostensibly about the aftermath of a nuclear World War Three, the film could only have been made by those who lived through World War Two: the blacker-than-black humor feels earned. The Bed Sitting Room is based on a play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus, which debuted as a one-act play in 1962, and was broadened into a full-length work in 1963. Antrobus was a noted English playwright and Army vet; Milligan, who had served in WWII, was a renowned radio and TV personality in England, and though he wasn’t particularly well known in the States, his manic and surrealistic radio program The Goon Show ran for an impressive nine years, helped kickstart the career of Peter Sellers, and influenced just about every British comedy group in its wake. By 1969 he was launching Q5, an experimental, stream-of-consciousness comedy program which debuted mere months before Monty Python’s Flying Circus and made that team (Spike Milligan fans all) realize they’d now have to work harder to make their own series cutting-edge. Meanwhile, Richard Lester, the very cutting-edge director of the Beatles films A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965), as well as The Knack…and How to Get It (1965), How I Won the War (1967), and Petulia (1968), had decided to take on Milligan and Antrobus’ play The Bedsitting Room – which had recently been revived on the stage, to great success – as a feature film boasting a cast loaded with famed British character actors, many of them veterans of either The Goon Show or Lester’s own filmography. (The opening credits list them “in order of height.”) Lester shot the film in the junkyards and polluted lakes that he found off England’s beaten paths, to represent a devastated London. Perhaps unwisely, the film was released with a poster proclaiming “We’ve Got a Bomb on Our Hands.” This was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Traffic is at a permanent standstill after the Bomb.

Actually, “bomb” is taboo in The Bed Sitting Room; the characters approach the word and then stumble their way past it, without ever quite speaking it. It’s as though the word has been wiped from their memory, despite the fact that the decimated landscape in which they putter about is all the evidence they need of what came before. As the film begins, the characters are scattered and frightened, though a few have begun to reconcile themselves into roles, to keep society functioning, or just to seize power where they can. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore (inseparable) are the Police, floating in the bottomless shell of a car which is tethered to a hot-air balloon; Cook barks orders at the denizens of the wasteland through a melted megaphone (it looks like one of Dali’s clocks). He prods that chipper fellow running the electric generator by bicycle. He asks that everyone “keep moving, keep moving,” to avoid the effects of atomic mutation, which manifests itself through bizarre transformations. A family peers out the windows of a train that perpetually runs in a circle through the empty stations of the Underground. A delusional nurse (Marty Feldman) watches everyone through his binoculars before inserting chaos into their lives. A raving lunatic in a bomb shelter (Harry Secombe) studies tangled strips of film for evidence of what might be poisoning the countryside. A doctor, Bules Martin (Michael Horton), introduced sitting on an enormous pile of black shoes (Doc Martens?) searching for a pair that fits, diagnoses the pompous Lord Fortnum (Sir Ralph Richardson) as transforming slowly into a bed-sitting room. This explains why Fortnum feels a strange compulsion to pave cement onto his cheek, and appears to be spontaneously producing bricks. In the opening scenes, Lester intercuts between his scattered characters with deliberate confusion; gradually they will come together, just as society begins to rebuild itself into the same depressingly ill-conceived structure.

A family dares to escape the safety of the London Underground: Mona Washbourne, Rita Tushingham, Richard Wardwick, Arthur Lowe

What little linear plot we receive involves that family in the train, which finally decides to leave the safety of their surroundings when they realize that their daughter Penelope (Rita Tushingham) isn’t “chubby,” as they thought, but actually eighteen-months pregnant by a boy, Allan (Richard Wardwick), riding the train behind them. They need to go topside to find a nurse, taking with them a chest, and, unwittingly, a stowaway riding inside it (Father is embarrassed that the chest appears to be growing hair from under its lid, so he keeps it neatly trimmed). They’re not long into their travels when they meet Nurse Arthur (Feldman), who hands them a death certificate for Mother (Mona Washbourne). “The way I’d like you to look at it sir is like this. You may have lost a wife – but you’ve gained a certificate.” Mona is distraught to learn that she’s dead, and the Nurse takes her away, where she falls into the shelter occupied by Harry Secombe, obsessed with the memory of his dead spouse. “Will you do for me what my first wife did?” he asks her breathlessly, cornering her against the wall. “Well, as long as we get it over quickly,” she says reluctantly. He then hands her some teacups and a saucer, which she throws at him while he screams, “Now, now, be reasonable, Mildred! She was nothing but a common secretary! I love you!” When this play has reached its conclusion, he slumps against a bookshelf in exhaustion, and then, recovering his senses, screams at her, “Get out, you slut!”

Marty Feldman as Nurse Arthur

The film is rich with absurdist dialogue. Dr. Bules Martin treats Lord Fortnum as follows:

“Take, um, six of these pills, one every half-mile.”
“Oh, but I can’t do that, I only live a mile away. This is Hyde Park, isn’t it?”
“Yes, then you’ll have to move further out, I’m afraid.”
“I tell you what, I’ll take the long road home.”

This is shortly followed by Spike Milligan, as “Mate” (a purposeless character who travels from scene to scene), knocking at the door to this doctor’s office without walls, and delivering a telegram for Martin, which is a pie in the face. Eventually our crumbling family unit meets the doctor, who asks to court Penelope. Father is so impressed by the doctor’s credentials that he immediately agrees to a union between the two, despite the fact that she’s in love with Allan, and about to give birth. She weds the doctor in a surrealistic ceremony on the shore of the sea (the Vicar swims over before conducting the proceedings), but it’s Allan who takes her to the mattress-free wedding bed. The doctor quickly becomes resigned to this. When they find a honeymoon suite, it’s the bed-sitting room, formerly Lord Fortnum, who’s finding his new state disagreeable. I should mention that the wardrobe in the room is Penelope’s mother, who, despite the transformation, objects strongly when people open her drawers. And Father, not immune to the effects of fallout, is beginning to turn into a parrot.

Doctor Bules Martin (Michael Hordern) rows Penelope (Rita Tushingham) to the chapel.

None of this makes any sense, except that it kind of does. The Bed Sitting Room follows an internal logic which keeps every non sequitur connected. There’s a cumulative energy, which means that in the early stretches the film feels randomly surreal and somewhat lethargic, but as the viewer begins to comprehend the rules of this fictional world, it achieves a narrative coherency as well as an eerie power. It’s natural to compare the script to Waiting for Godot, which has a similar progression, as well as Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. But you could also cite Lewis Carroll as an influence (Nurse Arthur is the Mad Hatter and the March Hare rolled into one, and Penelope is our sympathetic Alice). The non-stop absurdities are thematically organic; in the age of the nuclear bomb, when mankind has the unprecedented ability to wipe itself out of existence, The Bed Sitting Room‘s insanity feels like an appropriate response. Despair hangs heavily over every scene, and becomes almost unbearable in the finale, when Penelope finds herself the only character capable of weeping at the tragedy of their circumstances, and Sergeant Dudley Moore finally gets to swing that wrecking ball he’s been wielding, threateningly, for much of the film. But the dialogue continues, relentlessly, to be witty and wise, and the final image of the film is genuinely hilarious (and very Pythonesque, before that word was added to the OED). It’s a cathartic little film, and would make a fascinating double-feature with Godard’s Week-End (1967) if anyone could bear it. Highly recommended for anyone who likes their satire cynical and confidently strange.

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Heavy Metal (1981)

Posted on September 16, 2011 at 5:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Heavy Metal magazine debuted in the U.S. in the spring of 1977 with the image of a pointy-breasted robot bashing to pieces another robot with a wrench. The publishers of the National Lampoon had compiled this “adult illustrated fantasy magazine” primarily from the contents of the French Metal Hurlant (“Screaming Metal”), which had already been going for several years and had become a phenomenon in Europe. That magazine was published by Les Humanoides Associes, an organization fronted by artists Philippe Druillet and Jean Giraud (aka “Moebius”), writer Jean-Pierre Dionnet, and Bernard Farkas. The comics in Metal Hurlant were typically stream-of-consciousness, erotic, violent, grotesque, and gorgeous. Heavy Metal editors Sean Kelly and Valerie Marchant translated and serialized the best of the Hurlant stories, adding into the mix prose from noted science fiction and fantasy authors (Terry Brooks in the first issue, and later James Tiptree, Jr., Theodore Sturgeon, and even Steven Spielberg, excerpting his novelization of Close Encounters of the Third Kind), as well as comics from well-known American artists like Richard Corben and the recently-deceased Vaughn Bodé. Heavy Metal arrived at the right time. Star Wars was released that spring, and science fiction was the rage, but this magazine went to places George Lucas could never go: it was druggy, taboo-flaunting, funny, and oversexed. It was a hit.

"Grimaldi": an astronaut's gift to his daughter turns out to be murderous.

Soon talks began on a big-screen adaptation, an animated anthology film. The producer would be the same man who’d produced National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), as well as some of fellow Canadian David Cronenberg’s early films: Ivan Reitman. Each segment of the film – some of which were based upon Heavy Metal stories, others original – would be animated by a different independent unit, all of them working simultaneously to complete the film for director Gerald Potterton. Thus, Heavy Metal the movie has some of the same qualities of the magazine: an anthology that serves up one unique style after another; if one isn’t to your taste, you only need to wait a short while before the next is queued up. Given the title, it would be a requirement to line up a stellar soundtrack, and although most of the bands don’t represent “heavy metal,” they do represent 1981 pretty well: Devo, Cheap Trick, Sammy Hagar, Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, Donald Fagen, Stevie Nicks, Journey, Nazareth, Grand Funk Railroad, etc. Two soundtrack albums were released – one for the songs (it peaked at #12 on Billboard), and one for Elmer Bernstein’s superb and muscular score; Devo’s end-credits “Working in a Coal Mine” cover was released as a 7″ single bearing the Heavy Metal promo artwork. The R-rated animated film, laden with bare breasts and gore, was unleashed in August of 1981, and became a head-trip favorite for the midnight movie crowd over the next decade or so. It would have to be: entanglements with the music rights kept the film unavailable on video until after it made a theatrical relaunch on its 15th anniversary in 1996. Prior to that, most of its fans had just seen the film on late-night cable. (A Blu-Ray special edition was recently released.)

"Soft Landing": the short comic by Dan O'Bannon and Thomas Warkentin (top) was adapted closely for the film (bottom).

The film opens with a space shuttle floating through outer space. The cargo doors open, and out drops a white Corvette convertible, an astronaut at the wheel. The propulsive song “Radar Rider,” by Riggs, blasts on the soundtrack as the car is piloted toward Earth, burning through the atmosphere, hovering over the plains of a desert, and finally firing a parachute to land on all four wheels. This animation style won’t be repeated in the film: a series of photographs rotoscoped imaginatively and finally integrated into traditional cel animation as we transition from this first segment (based on a 1979 comic illustrated by Thomas Warkentin and written by Alien‘s Dan O’Bannon) into “Grimaldi,” which will act as the linking sequence for all of the film’s tales. The astronaut is the father to a young girl in a country farmhouse. He offers her a present, but when he opens the package, inside is a glowing green orb which immediately melts him into goop. This orb is our narrator, who is evil. He will tell the child tales of his cosmic influence before he destroys her. It’s not the strongest story arc: most of these stories are actually about good triumphing over evil (the omnipresent green orb), which makes you wonder why the orb would choose to tell them. (“Oh, I should tell you about this other time that I was defeated…don’t worry, this one also has boobs.”) “Grimaldi” was actually a last minute substitution for a more surrealistic linking device, storyboards of which are shown on the DVD and Blu-Ray.

Two sci-fi noirs depict a car chase gone wrong. Top: "The Long Tomorrow" by Dan O'Bannon and Moebius. Bottom: the film's "Harry Canyon."

Dan Goldberg and Len Blum’s “Harry Canyon” is the first full-bodied story in the film, and a fan favorite: the tale of a cynical taxi driver who gets mixed up with a duplicitous dame and some stolen loot (actually the glowing green orb). Storyboards and design are credited to Juan Gimenez, the illustrator of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Metabarons series, though the design of the futuristic New York – sprawling, decaying, and overwhelmed with crass advertisements – owes something to the style of Moebius. His collaboration with Dan O’Bannon, “The Long Tomorrow” (part 1 of which appeared in the July 1977 Heavy Metal), was a hard-boiled detective noir that seems to be the chief inspiration for “Harry Canyon.” Both stories, in turn, borrow liberally from Robert Aldrich’s classic Atomic Age noir Kiss Me Deadly (1955), in which Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer chased a mysterious and deadly box. Part of the reason “Harry Canyon” works so well is that the tough-guy dialogue is obviously parodic; when I saw this film in a packed theater in 1996, one of Harry’s single-entendres during a semi-graphic sex scene earned a big laugh from the crowd. Here you’ll also begin to note the presence of various SCTV performers in the voice cast: John Candy, Eugene Levy, Joe Flaherty, and Harold Ramis all contribute to Heavy Metal. (Harry is voiced by Richard Romanus, the veteran character actor who appeared in Scorsese’s Mean Streets and voiced Weehawk in Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards.)

"Den": Richard Corben's lusty comic (top) is adapted for the film (bottom).

Richard Corben’s Den was serialized in Heavy Metal from 1977-78; as much a love-letter to human anatomy as it is the pulp works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, and Robert E. Howard, the science fiction/sword & sorcery hybrid tells the story of a scrawny nerd teleported into another dimension, where he becomes the fully-nude, well-endowed warrior Den, and is soon trapped between sorcerers battling for possession of the crystal called the Loc-Nar. Corben’s follow-up, “New Tales of the Arabian Nights,” was originally slated for the film, but work was scrapped to deliver the more straightforward saga of “Den” instead (the love scene between Den and the Queen is actually animated from preliminary sketches for the “Arabian Nights” adaptation). Frankly, I wish they hadn’t changed their minds, but that’s because the first installment of “Arabian Nights,” depicting the tale of Scheherazade, is one of my favorite works of fantasy illustration. Admittedly, Den provides an easier template for a short segment of an anthology film, and delivers enough animated skin to keep the audience awake. It’s not taken the least bit seriously, and the casting of John Candy as the brawny Den is suitably whiplash-inducing. If you’re going to accuse Heavy Metal of being juvenile and stupid T&A, you’re going to point at “Den.” If you’re going to defend the film as silly escapist fun, you’ll point at “Den” too.

"Captain Sternn": Bernie Wrightson's original (top) and the same moment in the film version (bottom).

Master horror and fantasy illustrator Bernie Wrightson created the uncharacteristically comic “Captain Sternn,” which ran in Heavy Metal and in a 5-part comic book. The animated adaptation, at least from a design standpoint, might be the most impressive segment of Heavy Metal since it follows Wrightson’s panels so devotedly. (In the comparison above, note that even the two googly-eyed aliens in the background are carried over.) Eugene Levy effectively disguises his nasally voice to portray a booming Sternn, and Joe Flaherty plays his nervous lawyer. Unfortunately, it all devolves into a chase scene set to Cheap Trick’s “Reach Out” – not one of their better songs, though the lyrics to “reach out and take it” and “you’ll go the distance/you never thought that you could” amusingly remind one of Dirk Diggler’s inspirational power rock in Boogie Nights.

"So Beautiful & So Dangerous": the robot navigator in Angus McKie's original (above) and in the film (bottom).

Luckily, what follows is one of the film’s grooviest songs, Don Felder’s “Heavy Metal (Takin’ a Ride)”, playing over some spectacular rotoscoped animation of a B-17 (model) engaging in a dogfight before a night sky that looks like deep space. Most of the crew is massacred in the fight, and subsequently return to life as zombies to battle the trapped pilot, in this spooky, claustrophobic tale from future Return of the Living Dead (1985) writer/director O’Bannon. Comic book artist Mike Ploog, who also worked on Wizards, helped design the slime-dripping zombies. Next up is another abrupt change of mood: “So Beautiful & So Dangerous” sees an ocular UFO visiting Earth and accidentally abducting a Jewish secretary (Alice Playten). The ship is piloted by two drug-addled aliens (Ramis and Levy) and an efficient robot (Candy) who is equipped to sexually satisfy their captive; marriage follows. This stoner sex comedy is tonally at odds with Angus McKie’s original, which was a cosmic and philosophical saga (a large selection of Earthlings are taken on an interstellar voyage) with more intelligent touches of satire. As an adaptation, it might be a disappointment, but the animation’s design (abetted by Neal Adams, a famed artist for both Marvel and D.C.) and the trippy visuals nonetheless make for an iconic sequence for the film. There’s a contact high; you can almost smell the pot smoke.

"Taarna" (right) contains visual homages to Moebius' "Arzach" stories (left). Click to enlarge.

The final segment is the longest: “Taarna,” an original story written by the “Harry Canyon” team of Goldberg & Blum. The green orb causes a volcano to erupt, and its spillage transforms the inhabitants of a country into raging barbarians. A secret religious society summons the reincarnation of an ancient female warrior, the white-haired, leather-clad, pterodactyl-riding Taarna, to conquer the enemy. Though Ploog and fellow comic book artist Howard Chaykin are credited among the designers, there are visual quotes to the wordless “Arzach” stories of Moebius (see the above comparison), which appeared in America starting with Heavy Metal #1. This segment and O’Bannon’s “B-17” are the only straight-faced sequences in the film, though if O’Bannon’s was inspired by old E.C. horror comics, “Taarna” takes its queue from Sergio Leone Westerns. In one scene, the heroine strides through the swinging doors of a saloon (where an alien version of Devo is playing “Through Being Cool”) and takes out a couple of baddies with her sword, spilling oodles of green blood. After finally defeating the barbarian leader in a bloody duel, Taarna’s spirit is transmigrated into the body of the young girl who has been forced to listen to stories for a solid ninety minutes. Our evil-orb narrator is destroyed by his own storytelling; he should have kept his mouth shut.

"Taarna": an animated Devo performs "Through Being Cool."

The deadline was fast approaching, and an exploding farmhouse couldn’t be animated, so live-action footage of a model exploding is shown in slow-motion instead. Oh well; at least the film was completed, and there would be nothing else like it in theaters. The international army of animators produced a bona fide cult classic, a film that every science fiction and fantasy aficionado would have to watch as a rite of passage in the decades to come, and judge accordingly. A sequel arrived far too late (Kevin Eastman’s disappointing Heavy Metal 2000), and in the past few years, chatter has begun of a remake: originally to be overseen by David Fincher, though the latest talk has put it in Robert Rodriguez’s ever-growing stable of projects. (Can we give it back to Fincher?) I’d only argue that any remake should take the same approach as the original: divide up the workload and let the animators run wild with their uncensored imaginations. Once, in 1981, it worked.

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