DIVINE COMEDY

Cinephiles of my increasingly crusty generation are often quietly aghast at encountering young people who speak of films of the eighties as “classics” and appear generally aglow with nostalgia for the greater daring and political wit of the Hollywood blockbusters of yore. But these kids have a point, even if the counter-narrative, that the inventive and sophisticated films Hollywood produced in the seventies were driven out by the faster, dumber genre films of the following decade, is equally true.

Joe Dante is one filmmaker whose career actually supports the argument that eighties mainstream cinema smuggled in a lot of interesting and subversive elements, just as his partial sidelining from big-budget Hollywood filmmaking in recent years also points to his unwillingness to dumb down and strip his films of that anarchic glee, postmodern playfulness and satiric undercurrent. As Scorsese did after the box-office failure of King of Comedy, Dante has retreated from the corporate oversight of major studio production to pursue smaller and more interesting projects. A return to the big time may occur, but on his own terms.

Dante’s early experience in filmmaking was gleaned at Roger Corman’s New World, cutting trailers before moving on to low budget exploitation fare like Hollywood Boulevard (1976, co-directed with Allan Arkush) which cobbled together existing stunt footage around a parody of low-end Hollywood filmmaking that was more miss than hit, and the much better Piranha (1978), which enlisted John Sayles to revamp its screenplay, and has the nerve to open on a No Trespassing sign, recalling Citizen Kane. In Dante’s films, in-jokes are architecture.

Sayles probably injected the more humanist elements, such as a moment where the film’s comic bad guy, the summer camp supervisor played by king of camp Paul Bartel, becomes the film’s moral centre with a single accusing look. Dante gleefully massacres women and children, and his camera seems to linger lovingly on the pond-scum clinging to extras swimming at the supposedly luxuriant river resort.

The Howling (1981) developed Dante’s aesthetic further, firming up the elements which would serve as trademarks. Not only does the plot, in which werewolves are “treated” in a new age therapy commune, bristle with satiric potential, but the film self-satirizes, packing the background with references to and quotes from classic werewolf movies, and casting old-timers like John Carradine, Kevin McCarthy and Kenneth Tobey not just for their talent and amenability, but for the resonances they bring to House of Dracula, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing from Another World. For good measure, horror fan supreme Forrest J. Ackerman and Roger Corman himself make cameos.

Moving into the big studio mainstream, Dante was taken under the wing of Steven Spielberg, a very different mentor whose work, with its taut narrative sense and hyped-up version of classical film style, influenced Dante without smothering the more acerbic vision developed with Corman.

The collaboration began when Dante contributed a particularly extreme episode to the anthology film Twilight Zone: The Movie, in which an omnipotent child refashions his home into a cartoon world of nightmarish violence and irrationality.

The next Spielberg production, Gremlins (1984) looks increasingly miraculous, marrying the traditional warm-hearted Christmas fable to a jet-black sense of humour delighting in outrageous mayhem and sick jokes. The special effects may not be state of the art, but the gremlins always looked like puppets anyway: this was a film about murderous puppets trashing an idyllic (on the surface) small town.

The 1990 sequel is even better: granted carte blanche by Warner Bros, Dante sics his little monsters on a parody of Trump Tower and yuppy capitalism, as well as turning the attack inwards on the movie itself, so his compulsive quoting and undercutting of tonal consistency with wild gags reaches an insane apogee. Gremlins II: the New Batch is unique in not just being better than the original, but in trying to simultaneously tear itself apart as you watch it and reach back through time to tear its original apart too.

In between, Dante had fashioned Innerspace(1987), one of his most appealing capers, turning the plot engine of Fantastic Voyage (miniaturized submarine and crew injected into man’s bloodstream into what it should always have been, a rollicking farcical adventure. Even crazier ideas that seem to gave strayed in from elsewhere, such as the submarine causing its host body to warp into another form (I know, it’s petty to quibble about scientific plausibility in a shrunken sub movie) somehow works, partly through the sheer energy expended on the idea and the grotesquery of the results.

Matinee (1993), is a smaller, quieter affair, fascinatingly offering Dante the chance to work in a quieter register while being faithful to his obsessions. The atomic terrors of B-movie sci-fi (presented by John Goodman as a William Castle-style huckster filmmaker) are contrasted with the actual terrors of the Cold War, when a gimmicked-up monster movie plays a small town on the eve of the Cuban missile crisis. Something rather profound is captured about childhood terror and growing up in the shadow of the Bomb, and Mant!, the film-within-the-film, is one of Dante’s most charming pastiches.

Dante’s personal vision has experienced destructive studio interference several times: on the easygoing sci-fi adventure The Explorers (1985), and the more successful comedy The ‘burbs (1989). These used science fiction and horror premises respectively, to create excitingly ludicrous adventure and acerbic satire, but either the zany tone or the dark undertones seemed to make execs uncomfortable. Dante’s work seems particularly vulnerable to meddling from the uninformed, as was again the case with Loony Toons: Back in Action (2003). When a juggler has a great many balls in the air, as is habitually the case in Dante productions, it seems unwise to forcibly proffer outside contributions: the results can quickly shift from dizzying complexity and anarchic energy to sheer disarray. But all these films have points to commend them: only the tame ending of The ‘burbs really lets it down, letting the audience off the hook for their complicity in the heroes’ suburban paranoia, while The Explorers has charm to spare, even with entire subplots left on the cutting room floor and an ending rushed into cinemas while still at rough-cut stage. Loony Toons is a terrific movie which only seems like a really bad one, due to script interference in post-production. Shrill, manic and episodic, it still manages to lampoon consumer culture with surprising ferocity, and may be the last recorded instance of Steve Martin being funny on screen: only time will tell.

These large-scale films (which also include the engaging Small Soldiers, 1998) have always been accompanied by smaller films, anthology shorts and TV episodes. For a while, it looked like Dante might be forced out of the mainstream altogether, but his zestful burrowing into every cult byway of modern cinema and television meant there was no danger of his vanishing. Particular mention should be made of his two episodes of HBO’s Masters of Horror series: Homecoming (2005) was the first drama to tackle the Iraq war, and did so via a jet-black zombie comedy with recognizable parodies of Karl Rove and Ann Coulter falling prey to undead veterans. Defying accusations of bad taste by firing that charge back at the political leaders who truly deserve the accusation, the film is a cathartic explosion of rage barely concealed behind the mask of satire. The Screwfly Solution (2006) goes even further, abandoning most of the humour to tell an unsettling story in which violent male sexuality, lightly modified by alien intervention, brings about mankind’s extinction.

During his small-scale work, Dante had experimented with 3D, and so was a natural choice to helm a 3D feature when the medium was commercially revitalized. The Hole (2009) is conceptually modest but visually ambitious, exploiting 3D as both fun gimmick and narrative device: though intended for kids, it might perversely be Dante’s scariest show, thanks to its canny exploitation of space and sound to envelop the audience in its shadowy environments. Along with Scorsese’s Hugo (2011), this has been the most inventive use of 3D inspired by the new boom, and it’s a shame more people haven’t had a chance to see it projected in depth.

With a new film, Monster Love, in production, Dante seems to be staying true to his demons: it’ll be interesting to see if the darker strains of his recent work will resurface.

David Cairns