Second Chances: Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer (page 1)

SECOND CHANCES

christopher funderburg

special "not very halloween-ish" halloween edition
HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER

Despite their reputations, some films and filmmakers just don't do it for Funderburg and Cribbs. This series, Second Chances, follows their attempts to find greatness where they've previously failed to see it; to actively make an effort to appreciate esteemed artworks for which they currently have a distaste (or feel indifference). They'll give cult favorites like An American Werewolf in London another shot and dig deep in the filmographies of beloved auteurs whose appeal baffles them (like Nicholas Ray) - and with a little luck, maybe they'll even end up as newly-minted fans...

The subject: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

Initial resistance:

One extremely common path to cinephilia leads down a road paved with horror movies. Like many folks who later went on to be rarified enthusiasts of le cinema, my obsession with film found its footing on the most disreputable of genres, the one that frequently features screaming naked ladies meeting their end by pick, by axe, by chainsaw, bye-bye. It might seem counterintuitive that my love of Mike Leigh and Hollis Frampton has its roots in my youthful enthusiasm for Halloween and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but horror films by their nature end up being a pretty excellent gateway out of the world of mainstream cinema and into the world of movies that don't come to the Regal People's Plaza multiplex. First off, if you are even somewhat of a completist by nature, there's obviously a lot to dig into with long-running horror film series like Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre films - and they're movies every teenager in the United States is familiar with: you'd have to be some kind of a Mormon not to know the basic concepts of characters like Freddy and Jason. So, start with the popular, easily accessible favorites and dig in: what budding cinephile didn't spend an entire weekend burning through one or more of these series in marathons of total film emersion? It's a direct precursor to activities like spending all weekend at MoMA with Berlin Alexanderplatz or tackling Bela Tarr. The completism leads you through the work of the filmmakers (Evil Dead into Army of Darkness into maybe even Crimewave), into their influences (John Carpenter takes you from Halloween to They Live and Assault on Precinct 13 and then the Westerns on which he's riffing like The Searchers and Rio Bravo) and then into the larger world of cult cinema. The average teenager probably hasn't heard of Basket Case, but once you start poking around in the world of horror, your interest gets piqued about some titles that come up over and over again - then there's no going back once you experience Henenlotter. From there, it's into Euro-Art horror a la Dario Argento, then on to extreme Asian cinema like Tetsuo and Audition then on to envelope-pushing Art-exploitation cinema like Man Bites Dog and before you know it you're at Funny Games, Michael Haneke, Catherine Breillat and no longer a horror fan but a real film fan, one with a palate that can appreciate not only the genuine brilliance of slasher masterpieces like Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Halloween, but legendary classics like Tod Browning's Freaks and Fritz Lang's M. Once you're into Lang and Haneke, the whole universe of cinema is open to you: you know the process for hunting down obscure movies, you have a basic sense of film history and (since horror filmmakers tend to be reverential fans themselves) you have a map of what else to seek out - folks like Joe Dante and John Carpenter are more than happy to point you in the direction of their influences and heroes (and even compelling curios.) Horror film fandom naturally births a more expansive film fandom. (That sounds like a Cronenberg movie: Tobe Hooper in a bathtub giving birth to Catherine Breillat.)

Director John McNaughton's debute feature, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, is a landmark film in the horror genre and, as an important signpost on my travels to cinematic maturity, maybe I just expected too from it. It has a reputation of being the final word on the slasher subgenre, it's notorious tagline outlining the stakes: "He's not Freddy. He's not Jason. He's real." Ostensibly based on real-life killer and inveterate Texan Henry Lee Lucas, McNaughton got the idea for his film after seeing a t.v. news magazine about the vicious rube - the film's twist was its basis in reality. It was released in the fall of 1990, just before Silence of the Lambs came out in January 1991, and those twin meditations on the nature of serial murder more or less put the salsher subgenre out of its misery: Jason, Freddy and all had devolved into self-parody and the already thin form seemed to have totally lost its capacity for expressivity. Realistic films intended for thoughtful adult audiences (not just easily riled up teenagers on make-out dates), Henry and Silence pointedly laid bare the fact that slashers had become exactly the kind of mindless, puerile rot critics had accused them of being from the beginning. Silence, the thinking man's horror show, came with an unimpeachable pedigree and snatched up every Oscar in sight, while Henry's reputation centered on it being beyond the pale: a disturbing exploration of brutality and inhuman cruelty with no moral message to redeem it, an almost scientifically remote look at the nature of human evil. It was a key film in the development and life of the horror genre and one of the clear bridges between horror and art cinema, existing as both an example of the genre and a commentary on it. It appealed to thrill-seekers looking for the worst of the worst, folks who went in for the Nekromantics and Cannibal Holocausts of the world, as well as intellectuals looking to explore the meaning not only of humanity's darkest real-life depravity, but of an audience's attraction and relationship to onscreen violence. This was a loaded film. Descriptions of its notorious home invasion scene made me unsure if it was something my 15 year-old self even wanted to see - this was a film that contained a strong contender for the most disturbing scene in film history. But I did my duty and saw it.

It didn't do much for me. The home invasion scene did indeed upset me (I think the fact that a teenage boy about my age stumbled in on his parents being murdered only to be quickly over-powered is what did it), but I found the rest of the film to be grey, bland and boring. There's very little onscreen violence, but unlike for example The Texas Chain Saw Massace or Halloween which also lack oodles of gore, there was no intensity or drive to the film. It's a lot of scenes of Michael Rooker as the titular psychopath sitting around in a crummy apartment drinking beer and chit-chatting inexpressively with Tom Towles and Tracy Arnold (as his best friend and his best friend's cousin, respectively.) I understood objectively that this was one of the "authentic" selling points of the film: a serial killer’s life is probably pretty drab, tedious and depressing, but that didn't make it any more interesting to watch. If anything, it reminded me of the "eat your vegetables" films about poor people in destitute, war-torn countries that were meant to be endured and "contemplated" more than enjoyed or even appreciated. I'm embarrassed to admit it now, but it also really bugged me that Tracy Arnold isn't good-looking; I found it tough to engage her as a sexual object despite the fact that Towles and Rooker do so throughout the film and their sexual relationship to her more or less drives the story. I had an "ugh, don't make me think about these ugly losers fucking" reaction to the whole scenario. I suppose that’s a symptom of my overall reaction to the film: this isn’t as compelling or disturbing as I'd imagined it would be, it's mainly just unpleasant – but "wait in line at the DMV while hungover" unpleasant not "contemplate the void of existence" unpleasant. Plus, I couldn't believe that the filmmakers took Henry Lee Lucas' confessions at face value. From an early age, I've been drawn to true crime books and I knew plenty about Lucas before I even heard about the movie – and Lucas was a colossal white trash liar who confessed to over 600 murders. His stories were the result of dual, interlocking agendas: Lucas wanted to play the big man after being caught and sentenced to death ("You think I'm evil? I'm the most evil man in the world!") and the police were eager to close out a bunch of cold cases and make themselves look good ("You will no doubt be impressed to hear that we solved all those old murders - it turns out it was this one dude.") Almost all of his confession was laughably easy to disprove despite the police initially touting their amazing accomplishment of being able to put to rest many seemingly unsolvable cases. Henry works directly from Lucas' own version of his sinister self: he would commit roughly two murders a week, completely at random, with no methodology or pattern or even pre-planning, in places no one would expect him to be, a shadowy uber-criminal capable of committing all manner of atrocity and mayhem without ever tipping his hand. Lucas' supposed supergenius malevolence also gave the police an easy out: we couldn't solve those murders because this scheming madman is just. that. evil. Henry Lee Lucas was indeed a horrific psychopath who killed a lot of people, but the dispassionate ease and frequency with which his cinematic surrogate commits murders in Henry truthfully resembles Jason Voorhees far more than any real life killer.

So, my problem with Henry was a twofold failure for the film to live up to its reputation: I felt it was not particularly more realistic than Halloween and it certainly wasn't a better movie. I've long been a fan of director John McNaughton, but mainly for his delightful camp classic Wild Things, the best winking genre subversion ever to star Neve Campbell. I'm just assuming you all are cultured enough to be on board with that: go ahead and watch it again if you have your doubts. I'll wait right here. It's Bill Murray's most charming performance in the time period between Ghostbusters and Rushmore. However, McNaughton didn't exhibit much of a personality with Henry - it inarguably lacks the bravura filmmaking of Evil Dead, Halloween or the peerless and constantly aforementioned Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It even lacks the clever hooks and memorable intensity of something like Sleepaway Camp or Stuart Gordon's work. On a purely stylistic level, it didn't rate above run of the mill slashers like The Burning or a Friday the 13th (parts 2 through 4). Like those films, it featured a lot of go-nowhere scenes of characters getting drunk and hanging out randomly punctuated by scenes of murder. In Henry, the only difference is that the ones doing the hanging out, drinking and fucking were middle-aged losers and not nubile teenagers. As a sexy, sexy nubile teenager myself when I first saw the film, it was hard to rate that difference as an upgrade. The realism that supposedly redeemed the tedium failed to materialize: in its own way, Henry was as sensationalistic and engineered for shock value as any third-rate stalk-and-kill cycle starring Linda Blair. It's undeniably a lurid, repulsive movie, one in which the camera lingers over grostesque corpses and the brooding score pounds away at the audience. The film intends to be a portrait of its audience's worst nightmares: a implaccable, opaque killing machine with seemingly no motivation, an emotionless robot who cuts and slices his way through unsuspecting, underserving victims for reasons that will forever remain obscure, inscrutable, inhuman. Just as Michael Meyer's body will no longer be there when Dr. Loomis looks out the window for it, Henry will get away at the end of the film, forever able to avoid detection and terrorize us, a creature lurking in the darkness, a monster without a mask. That's fine, I guess. It just doesn't match up with the film's reputation. I didn't think it was a bad movie, just one that failed at being interesting. Plus, I rented it the same day as Videodrome. So you lose, Henry. Go back to Chicago.

Reasons for reassessment:

The story of Henry's path from production to exhibition is a big part of its lore: McNaughton was originally hired by a pair of brothers (Malik and Ali Waleed) to direct a wrestling documentary, but that film fell apart and they decided to use the remaining funds to make a slasher film (it being 1986 and that's just what movie producers did with a hundred grand.) The resulting movie recieved the kiss of death from the MPAA: an X rating that couldn't be appealed or reduced no matter how much McNaughton altered the film. They simply found it to be too disturbing to ever recieve even an R rating. Saddled with the X rating, the filmmakers couldn't advertise the film in any major newspaper and several of the largest video store chains would refuse to carry it in stock. Also, the Waleed bros. apparently thought it wasn't very good, so they were in no hurry to rally to its cause. Roger Ebert saw it at the Telluride Film Festival in 1989 and immediately got behind it: his 3 and half star review called it "a low budget tour de force" and his prominence as a film critic essentially jolted it into the mainstream and out the circuit of film festival and midnight madness screenings through which it had been drifting for the past few years. The part of that story that generally gets left out interests me the most: the guest curator of the Telluride Film Festival in 1989 was none other than Errol "the greatest of all time" Morris. Morris had seen Henry at a midnight screening and personally selected it for the 1989 Telluride program. He insisted that Ebert make time for it - and Ebert's professed favorite film being Morris' Gates of Heaven, the portly taste-maker toddled out of his comfort zone and took a seriously violent movie seriously (instead of suspecting its makers and audience of the worst, like he did with I Spit on Your Grave* and Blue Velvet.) Morris' recommendation is clearly the missing link in Henry's jump from cult curio to cult classic - and I'm with Ebert on this one: when Errol Morris tells me something, I listen carefully and take his suggestions. Such careful listening and suggestion taking is, after all, how I came to see the description and sanity defying documentary freakout The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On.

The Morris connection is particularly interesting in light of Morris' relationship to serial murder: his doctoral thesis focused on the subject, his work revolving around a series of interviews with notorious killers like Edmund Kemper (a massive 6'7" beast of a man whom prison officials feared would kill Morris as he longed for death and committing a fresh, new homcide while in prison was the only channel by which he could be sentenced to capital punishment) and Ed Gein (the extremely loose inspiration for both Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.) Morris's relationship with Gein ultimately led him to filmmaking - his trip to Wisconsin to meet the man himself and see the sites of Gein's crimes united him with his future mentor/antagonist Werner Herzog. Morris would later claim that Herzog "stole" the desolate Wisconsin landscapes from Morris for use in Stroszek, but their trip to the great plains state first acted as the catalyst for Morris transitioning from incorrigible failed graduate student to legendary filmmaker - shortly after their trip, Herzog even hooked Morris up with crew and equipment for Morris' debut film Gates of Heaven, although Morris fired the cinematographer** recommended by Herzog after just one day of filmming. At any rate, Morris' bona fides on the subject of serial killers are extremely legit and his enthusiasm for Henry made me question my dismissal of it. Morris absolutely gets the benefit of the doubt over my own tastes when it comes to both le cinema and le sexually stunted monsters who slaughter their own mothers (something Kemper, Gein and Lucas all had in common.) Being just a kid when I first saw it, I was totally unaware of any of the fascinating backstory (and probably unaware of Morris, although The Thin Blue Line has been a touchstone film for me from as long as I can remember caring about movies.) I was curious how all of this nonsense flavored the film - even if it didn't redeem what was on screen, it probably made viewing Henry a richer experience.

I should throw in here somewhere that I've slowly become a Michael Rooker superfan. I think it was Slither that clinched it. Additionally, I'm a big fan of Fantomas' take on Henry's brooding, insistent score. Those were factors.

Finally, my wife and I watch a lot of horror movies. It's true. Without a doubt, it's her favorite genre and one of the interesting facets of her being from Colombia is that she never had access to giant swaths of American pop culture, so there's many many classic horror films she's never seen. I mentioned it while giving The Crying Game a second chance that she had never heard a single thing about that film or its infamous twist - and the over-hype around Neil Jordan's wang shocker failing to wend its way down to the equator really isn't the exception to the rule: lots of classics movies from our youth, from Silence of the Lambs to Leprechaun ("you're going to love it, my sweetness: it's about an evil leprechaun that wants to kill Jennifer Aniston!"), simply didn't even glancingly scrape the collective Colombian cultural consciousness. Sure, Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees made their mark, but Henry isn't Freddy, he isn't Jason, he's a bullshit amalgamation of a colossal white trash loser's most ridiculous lies! Honestly, she enjoys serial killer and slasher movies, this one is a classic and who am I to judge? We've watched enough films on Netflix instant like Bikini Girls on Ice, Blood Games and R.O.T.: Reunion of Terror that I was beginning to suspect that Henry really deserved another look. In the context of crappy slasher films, it probably was a masterpiece of sorts and I should really give it its due, right? At very least, I should compare it to Visiting Hours, a really effective little slasher starring Michael Ironside that I only watched for the first time in January. If I thought of something like that as "good," shouldn't I really be mentally filing Henry in the same category? Aside from the notorious home invasion, I could remember very little about the film - who knows, maybe it would be more to my sensibility now? Surely, I'm willing to give Errol Morris the benefit of the doubt. And Maritza had never heard of it, so it'd be worth putting it in front of her - enough people think of it as a classic that it might earn her highest praise: "Good choice."

* Did Ebert expect that opening his review of Grave by calling it "a vile bag of garbage" would keep audiences away from it? Or just that they would look into their own sick souls and repent?

** Ed Lachman, who lost his glasses to the sulfur fumes of La Soufriere and later won an Academy Award for Far from Heaven.

(continued on page 2)

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