Terrifier (2016)

USA, 85 minutes

Director / writer / editor: Damien Leone

Photography: George Steuber

Music: Paul Wiley

Cast: David Howard Thornton, Jenna Kanell, Samantha Scaffidi, Catherine Corcoran, Pooya Mohseni, Matt McAllister

My lifelong general policy on sequels—don’t ever, ever bother with them—does not help very much with franchises nowadays, arguably including the whole 16 years and counting Marvel universe. The Terrifier franchise, a canny mix of bitterly sardonic humor and extreme violence, is a good example. It starts with a 20-minute short from 2011, also called Terrifier and also featuring Art the Clown (and also available in the 2013 All Hallows’ Eve anthology picture by director and writer Damien Leone). That short provides a good overture and stake in the ground for what’s to come. Or so I presume because, full disclosure, my gorge rose basically as far as I could stand with this one and I invoked my sequel rules out of fear of what I’ll find in Terrifier 2 (2022, which got good reviews from people who like it better) and Terrifier 3 (2024 and now playing in theaters).

Art the Clown is not exactly a mime, but he never speaks. He is more like Charles Chaplin, using mincing gestures and exaggerated facial expressions to communicate—and, mostly, in his case, to terrify. Which he does quite effectively. He is terrifying and gross and powerful. His unsettling appearance pitches in to the melee with thick black lines of makeup and that stupid cockeyed hat. There is some uncertainty for most of this picture about whether he is just another fictional serial killer in the movies wearing a costume or something perhaps more supernatural. There is no uncertainty about his brutality. One particular scene here, more or less the centerpiece of the picture even though it occurs relatively early, really merits content warnings. Pay attention to them and to your limits because this movie can be very unpleasant.

Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

Italy / USA, 229 minutes
Director: Sergio Leone
Writers: Harry Grey, Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Enrico Medioli, Franco Arcalli, Franco Ferrini, Sergio Leone, Stuart Kaminsky, Ernesto Gastaldi
Photography: Tonino Delli Colli
Music: Ennio Morricone
Editor: Nino Baragli
Cast: Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern, Treat Williams, Tuesday Weld, Burt Young, Danny Aiello, William Forsythe, Joe Pesci, Louise Fletcher, James Hayden, Darlanne Fluegel, Larry Rapp, Richard Bright, Jennifer Connelly, Scott Schutzman Tiler, Rusty Jacobs, Brian Bloom, Adrian Curran

Director and cowriter Sergio Leone's final film as a director (and his first in 13 years) initially looks like a departure from his earlier movies. In many ways Leone's whole career was about departures. He reinvented the Western in the '60s as an operatic, lugubrious, and explosive play of set pieces, composed as artfully as anything by Michelangelo Antonioni, and incidentally lending cinema history a title trope in Once Upon a Time in the West that hasn't been used up yet. Not only did Leone ape that title for this movie, but many others have used it since as well, with memorable "once upon a time" pictures for Mexico, Anatolia, Rio, Mumbai, China, and more (including next year, from Quentin Tarantino, Hollywood). I still haven't figured out what it signifies exactly, beyond a certain dreamy fairy tale yet cynically knowing epic nostalgia, with violence.

If Westerns are about the impulse to get further and further from civilization, about Huck Finn's eternal yen to light out for the Territory, then Once Upon a Time in America is about the first stop that immigrants from Europe made on the quixotic journey and the place where many of them pulled up and stayed, the teeming ghettoes of New York and other Eastern cities at the turn of the century. The story involves four youths who come of age with approximately Prohibition, three Jews and a Pole (approximately) who fight for social position in New York with Irish and Italians ahead of them in line and WASPs entirely out of reach (except, sometimes, their women). They commit petty crimes, battle for turf, and eventually graduate to bootlegging. It sounds like a typical gangster picture, and indeed as a marathon it sits comfortably next to the first two Godfather movies and Goodfellas. But it's a Leone picture and also strays at will into just plain weird stuff.

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

C'era una volta il West, Italy / USA / Spain, 175 minutes
Director: Sergio Leone
Writers: Sergio Donati, Sergio Leone, Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci
Photography: Tonino Delli Colli
Music: Ennio Morricone
Editor: Nino Baragli
Cast: Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Claudia Cardinale, Jason Robards, Gabriele Ferzetti, Keenan Wynn, Paolo Stoppa, Lionel Stander, Jack Elam, Woody Strode

I started preparing to take another look at Once Upon a Time in the West a week or two in advance, by listening to the soundtrack album. Interestingly, it is less than 40 minutes long, compared with the movie, which is nearly three hours. The music makes such an impact in the movie that I hadn't realized or thought much about all the silence in it—silence and sound effects, that is, such as the squeaking and creaking windmill that punctuates the long first scene. There's some dialogue too. But focusing on Ennio Morricone's soundtrack may be as good a way as any to ease into the glacial pace and brutal cruelties of this movie.

The narrative involves four main characters, operating and conniving in and around railroad crews laying track in the American Southwest. Indeed, so classic is this movie in its intents that Monument Valley is one of its most recognizable settings (though other scenes were shot in Italy and Spain). Each of the four characters—Frank (Henry Fonda), Harmonica (Charles Bronson), Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale), and Cheyenne (Jason Robards)—comes with his or her own interlocking musical theme, which swirl together as the characters encounter one another, elevating the music to a dramatic involvement that's rarely so integrated.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Italy / Spain / West Germany, 161 minutes
Director: Sergio Leone
Writers: Luciano Vincenzoni, Sergio Leone, Agenore Incrocci, Furio Scarpelli, Mickey Knox
Photography: Tonino Delli Colli
Music: Ennio Morricone
Editors: Eugene Alabiso, Nino Baragli
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef, Luigi Pistilli, Rada Rassimov, Antonio Casas

Eli Wallach's teeth are too good—and that goes for Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef too. Gleaming white and straight and lined up just the way modern-day dentists like them. At some point—I think usually around the time Tuco (aka "the Ugly," Wallach) has brought Blondie (aka "the Good," Eastwood) to a monastery to recover from a bad time in the desert—I notice how well tended those teeth are and I am taken temporarily out of the action. My last complaint. That's the niggling level of my criticism about The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which is otherwise practically flawless.

It is, as the mystifying phrase we like to use now has it, what it is, and makes no bones about it. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a cartoon-level Western trafficking in existentialism, with extra fine shooting and a bone-simple story of revenge and greed animating the three principals, as the divertissement, cutting across history and causing it to fall away: the Civil War, the railroads, horses and guns and broad brim hats and brown liquor downed straight. All the familiar elements are here, but merely to serve as feeble context for these three gods striding through and defining the action, straight out of a deck of tarot cards—the two angels of heaven and hell, and the trickster fool with the sad, sad story.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

#18: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)

Until the legions of imitators came along in Quentin Tarantino's wake, I'm not sure anyone ever made movies the way Sergio Leone did. Now it sometimes seems like everyone does, but the original remains the best. His forte was visuals, cunningly edited—giant Cinemascope images of vast empty landscapes alternating with close-ups of craggy faces, equally vast and empty, and as imposing as mountains. Dialogue is at a minimum; long sections could probably get away with intertitles. But he was no throwback to silent movies, as his sound designs are integral to his storytelling, whether it's a windmill in need of oil, the whining echoes of gunfire, or the fly buzzing that Emily Dickinson knew. His collaborations with composer Ennio Morricone—particularly in Once Upon a Time in the West, where each of four characters arrive with individualized musical themes, which interact and develop as they do—are uniquely memorable and perhaps his single greatest achievement.

In fact, it was the theme song that drew me in the first place to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which seems to be the one I return to most. As a junior high kid I was lost in the glacial pace of this nearly three-hour picture (the back end of a trilogy with A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More), but my interest picked up considerably whenever the theme started playing again. The scene that's most striking to me now (not available that I could find on YouTube) involves a group of POWs ordered to play music to mask the sounds of torture. The song they play, "La historia de un soldado," is immeasurably sad, and even as they play it they are immeasurably sad too. The way it's staged and cut is absurd and moving all at once, a trick Leone manages to play over and over again in his pictures.

Ennio Morricone, "La Storia Di un Soldato (The Story of a Soldier)" (1966)

(listen)

Here's a song whose impact I suspect is almost entirely dependent on seeing the movie from which it comes, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and even more specifically the scene with which it is associated in its context. In effect I am recommending with this a 161-minute movie, and I know that's a lot to ask. Odds are reasonably good if you read this blog that you have seen it, so I call your attention to the scene in which Eli Wallach's Tuco is tortured for information in a Civil War POW camp. An impromptu POW orchestra, assembled for the purpose, is instructed to play when prisoners are tortured, in order to mask the sounds of the screams. This is the song they play. Truly, it's ludicrous—the song is a narrative device, it doesn't mask screams, it's quiet. It sounds the way you and the cowed orchestra feel in the moment, knowing such depravity goes on in this world, in tandem with the powerlessness of the situation, which must be accepted. The music is slow, ponderous, yet filigreed and lovely, and for all its simplicities it verges on the ornate. It's also a production piece that would likely not even be easy to reproduce on a stage with a soundboard, let alone standing at dusk in the open corner of a POW camp in the Texas desert, moaning vocal lines, blowing sweet harp, tapping fragile notes on a xylophone. The scene is thus almost funny, yet deeply moving at the same time. The brutalities inside the cabin, the expressions on the faces of the musicians outside and of the leering guards who find it all a big joke, and the mournful music itself—the heart is absolutely rent.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly OST (1966)

In listening recently to this remarkable soundtrack from Ennio Morricone I have appreciated that I saw the movie again recently, and wondered if that is somehow coloring my perception, causing me to overvalue it now. If that's the case all I can see is one of two things: 1) for Pete's sake, go and see this movie, or 2) caveat emptor, the dependency might be real. But I don't think so. The title theme, way back in the day, drove me to see the movie in the first place. I remember being confused then by the whole thing, too young or impatient or both to grasp the nuance of the pacing. And while I still appreciate that title theme and the many ingenious variations of its recurrence—who, after all, could possibly argue with the grunting and whistling and whip cracks and "Aaaaa / Go go go migo"—now it's the shrewd, deft sensibility that Morricone brought in collaboration with the movie's director and co-screenwriter, Sergio Leone, that really seems to me to bring the depth. "La Storia De Un Soldato" (or "The Story Of A Soldier"), for example, appears as the music that an abused troupe of POWs performs in an amazing and bizarre scene, forced to play in order to drown out the cries of soldiers, in this case Eli Wallach's Tuco ("the Ugly"), as they are tortured. It's a beautiful and haunting song, but made even more so by the brutal context in which it is used (if comically weird as well, I must say). The climaxing numbers here, "L'estasi Dell'oro (or "The Ecstasy of the Gold") and "Il Triello" (or "The Trio"), are also not to be missed, absolutely stirring, unforgettable, in the way they manage to put a cap on the scene that puts a cap on the resolution of the movie. When you factor in other work Morricone has done for dozens of movies—I particularly know and can also enthusiastically vouch for Once Upon a Time in the West (another Leone), The Mission, and The Untouchables—I think you know where I'm going with this. The guy is a master, and this and the movie it accompanies are as good as any places to start. So don't waste any more time if you can help it. Get on this.