casting Lots

I blew off two Halloween parties yesterday to make a point of roping off a block of time for horror viewing. Otherwise, I knew it might be forever before I got around to my Salem's Lot and A Return to Salem's Lot double feature, near five hours of boonie vampirism and Stephen King small-town ambiance. (Next week, perhaps a double feature of 30 Days of Night and Frostbite, Anders Banke's Swedish flick about, uh, vampires terrorizing a town where it's dark for a month.)

I got nothing against Salem's Lot. It's not especially good, but it's fine, considering you know what you're getting into. It's very Kingy (aspects of Salem's Lot show up later in Needful Things and The Stand, at the very least), and it moves fairly well for a three-hour miniseries in which very little happens. That said, very little happens. In lengthy-King-novel mode, Salem's Lot offers a cross-section of people in the town, which is nice if you're a fan of the book or appreciate the small-town study, but potentially dull if you're just hoping for vampire action, though that eventual vampire action is fairly well executed, with a creepy, pleasantly unexplained creature (the always intriguing Reggie Nalder) which really only appears a couple of times. It's not nail-bitingly suspenseful, but the minimalism of the monster works well. Overall, Tobe Hooper does a good job, and the thing is certainly well-cast and -acted. David "Hutch" Soul carries an awful lot of screen time, and supporting players do nicely, with solid work from Kenneth McMillan and Ed Flanders in particular. Even the talentless Fred Willard is inoffensive here. James Mason turns it all the way up to 3 - he must have had faith in the production.

So, Salem's Lot is fine, if a little like watching Fright Night twice in immediate succession. It was successful in its TV run, gathered a few Emmy nominations, and is still in print on DVD and fairly well-known (it came in at #22 on that list going around a couple weeks ago of the top seventy vampire flicks, ranked by average IMDb/Rotten Tomatoes ratings.

A Return to Salem's Lot would be somewhat lower. Probably a couple hundred spots lower. Salem's Lot has a 6.4 on IMDb; Return has a 3.8. I'd like to think the score would increase if Larry Cohen fans could actually find the thing - to date, the only DVD release is in Germany - though Cohen fans are more likely to track down the affordable VHS, whereas Salem's Lot fans might stumble across it, presumably bargain-priced in keeping with the Warner Brothers tendency, and pick it up, leading to an additional supply of ratings in the 2-4 area. The chief criticism seems to be that it has nothing to do with the original book or miniseries, which is certainly true, but as I posted yesterday to sing the praises of Halloween III: Season of the Witch, it should be clear that I don't see the problem. Presumably the secondary criticism is that it's also got a number of boom mic appearances, so if that bothers you, be warned, but I don't see why it should.

In any case, the movie, directed by Cohen and co-written with James Dixon (whom Cohen cast in over a dozen movies), is great. It's instantly, weirdly aggressive; almost all the dialogue for the first ten or so minutes is yelled, snapped, or otherwise angrily intoned. It's a hard movie to describe, but rest assured that it's very much a Larry Cohen film, and a busy one, with Cohen taking his usual satiric notice of all manner of topics.

It's chiefly about cross-cultural moral relativism; the opening scene introduces Michael Moriarty as objective, removed anthropologist Joe Weber, and with him one of the movie's more interesting aspects. When Joe hits Salem's Lot, Cohen teases this out - for everything we know about vampires (and we see them ugly and killing before we meet them socially), they do seem to have their strong points. They have their own society and their own system, they only kill occasionally, and they're even into renewable resources. Demonizing folktales are just that, they demonstrate, chopping garlic and showing off mirrored reflections. Their culture doesn't seem to be worse than the Amazonian natives in the opening scene or, as Joe points out to his assistant, the way the U.S. goes about its own judicial business. Joe's in a unique position to appreciate a small subset of society with its own customs, and they make him a complicated offer. There's a seduction aspect that could be unconvincingly dominant in lesser hands, but Cohen, to his credit, leaves it in Joe's hands to consider the offer in terms of his ethical views up to this point.

Too bad the angle doesn't quite get resolved. There's a bit of unexplained gap in Joe's reasoning, which is unfortunate, but we're forced to write it off to some unspoken realization that he can't get behind vampirism, anthropologically valid or not. If Joe's moment of coming around isn't quite specified, Cohen makes sure we see for ourselves. Cultural relativism is great in theory, the flick says, but ultimately it's just a shield against making a moral choice. Cohen offers everything you need to see this with the introduction of a Nazi hunter. Admirably, the Nazi isn't the head vampire, but Cohen does like to leave it to the viewer to figure things out, and here he gives us echoes, if not parallels: another subset of society with its own rules and morals, perhaps inscrutable to outsiders. Joe is an odd film character: one who grows from an objective intellectual, respectful of cultures outside his own, to a simple, emotional man, who sees right and wrong without much in the way of gray in between.

Too, the morality angle leads nicely into discussion of another aspect of misunderstanding across groups, as the film looks at parenting and generation gaps, from Joe and Jeremy's mutually uncomprehending relationship (Joe confusedly asks the kid, 11 or 12, "Did you...did you get laid last night?") and the lessons imparted by the ersatz grand/father figure Van Meer to the kindly old town-hall vampires in three-piece suits and silk pajamas, bemusedly sighing oh-dear-me at the fashions of the punky travelers taking a wrong turn into Jerusalem's Lot.

Return to Salem's Lot offers a surprisingly decent performance by the kid (Ricky Addison Reed, who never made another film), the debut appearance of Tara Reid (who made many more films, but would never again be as believable as this, playing a 12-year-old vampire), and Cohen's friend and role model Sam Fuller, who - I never thought I'd say this - upstages Michael Moriarty. In a Larry Cohen movie.

Warner Brothers: A Return to Salem's Lot on DVD, please. Larry Cohen commentary. Thank you.