Edmond, the guy from beyond

Rainy Tuesdays suck. In fact, any rainy day sucks, especially when you have to bike your way through town. When you're on a day off and are not planning to move, it's bearable. Open your windows wide, and read while listening to the falling drops. If the weather is thunderous, it's even better ! And if you have a dog - or a wimpy girlfriend - that gets easily scared, you'll have the occasion to confort them.

Confort is something an unsuspecting viewer might need after a projection of EDMOND, Stuart Gordon's latest, adapted from a David Mamet play. You've read about it in our oversaturated "alternative" media : Mamet wrote this while feeling pretty angry with the world, in the middle of a divorce. Which is probably why the movie starts with Edmond, played by a sad-faced William H. Macy, telling his wife that she bores him, and that he wants to leave her. The dialogues are typically well-written, and their constant presence in the movie are a decent hint that the script was thought & written for the stage, and not the screen.



However, under Gordon's supervision, and with Macy's spell - his performance here is exceptional, as in almost every movie he appears in, to be honest - things become quite enjoyable and we just sit back, relax, and witness mister Edmond's slow descent into the grey of a New York night that could be any night, really.

He's on a quest for sex - and this will lead him into many questionable places, with even more questionable people, and he'll become a victim, and then a man fighting for his rights. But not just in any way. After being robbed and beaten, he goes to a pawn shop to sell his ring, and buys an army knife - a knife that will, in a way, become the symbol of his emancipation. From the role he's been given, and from the boring ass life he's been leading so far. From the fear of others - and from his own destiny.

Some of the "enlightement" scenes are dragging on, and we get the message they convey a couple of minutes before they're over. The city is shown as a very macho one, much like in any Ferrara drama, where men & their desires rule the night. The abundance of objectified women we come across is underwhelming. Macy's digging for skin. The first whore we meet is played by Denise Richards, and this is quite unsettling as I have seen the Seinfeld episode in which she appears - as NBC's Russel's daughter, no less, whose cleavage hypnotises Costanza - just last week.

Mena Suvari plays another whore who appears later on, but Edmond's refusal to pay too much for sex will be productive : he'll end up boning Julia Stiles without paying a cent. Jeffrey Combs, a guy that Stuart Gordon cannot honestly NOT put in one of his movies, plays a hotel desk clerk and only has a few, amusing lines.

Joe Mantegna appears in a bar scene, and his scene-stealing speech gives Edmond the boost he needed to go out and search for the ultimate reason to live : pussy. The ending of the movie is one of the best I've ever seen, and I've my share. It beats the surprise ending of any Mario Bava flick, and that's saying a lot.

*

I saw EDMOND at Fantasia on Sunsay night, for its Montreal première, and Stuart Gordon was there to introduce it. After the short Q & A that followed the projection, he announced that he had brought his director's cut of FROM BEYOND, and that if anybody wanted to stick around, he was showing it as a bonus.

FROM BEYOND was originally released in 1986, shortly after RE-ANIMATOR, and is another H. P. Lovecraft adaptation. I had seen the movie about ten years ago, so I decided to stick around. 90% of the crowd also left, and the screening was intimate, almost like in a campy drive-in on a week night. I put my arm around Miss Bijoux and we sat with our feet resting on the front seats, like teenagers.



"Director's cut" should read "uncut" : lots of the gore that was absent from the movie's release in 1986 has been found & cleaned, and re-inserted here; my memory's not good enough to compare the two versions, so let's just say that the juices are flowing.

It starts with Jeffrey Combs and Ted Sorel working on some kind of machine that stimulates the brain's pinal gland and enables humans to see creatures who are part of another dimension but who are "constantly floating around us" : the machine, when turned on, is pretty dangerous, because if you can see these monsters, they can also see you... Sorel gets a little too eager about his discovery and end up with his head bit off his body, and when the police discovers the scene they lock up Combs and the local mental ward labels him as schizo.

Barbara Crampton, however, has another opinion. She convinces the police chief to let her re-create the experiments, with the assistance of Combs and of another cop (Ken Foree, hilarious) posing as a bodyguard. So Combs is released and starts playing with the paranormal once again. Crampton gets fascinated by the machine, her gland stimulations and the "sexual stimulation" it provides, and goes S&M on our asses. Not unlike Jenny in Ruggero Deodato's DIAL HELP, about which I wrote last week, she spends quite some time running around in her sexy outfit, oscillating between sex-crazed nympho and scientist.

The movie never loses its second degree treatment, and rarely gets serious. To see Jeffrey Combs, head shaved, bandages wrapped around his face, walk around the hospital he's taken to like a zombie, with his pinal gland hanging from his forehead like a soft penis, eating brains through his victim's eye sockets, is extremely surreal. And extremely sexual. Gordon suggests that Lovecraft's writings can be sexy, or that, at least, they have sexual undertones. Not sure about that, but seeing Barbara go wild sure was nice.