Frankenweenie (Movie Review)

Frankenweenie (Walt Disney Pictures, 2012; Directed by Tim Burton)

Everyone loves an underdog story.  But what about a six-feet-under-dog story?

Tim Burton's Frankenweenie (an elaboration of the 1984 live-action short of the same title) is well-stocked with the kind of endearingly oddball characters that viewers have come to expect from the director.  Best in Show in that regard is Sparky (what better name for a disinterred and electrically-revivified canine?), the spunky bull terrier transformed into an undead Spuds Mackenzie by his grieving and deeply devoted owner, ten-year-old Victor Frankenstein.  A bundle of energy even before he's lightning-zapped on Victor's laboratory slab, Sparky effuses charisma with his barks and bounces, and his ever-wagging and sometimes disconnecting tail.

The film doesn't have the slapstick approach of Young Frankenstein or the satiric quirkiness of Edward Scissorhands (another Burton film that invokes the cinematic work of James Whale), but delivers plenty of humor.  There are sight gags and potty jokes for the juvenile-minded, and brilliant flashes of wittiness that will delight older members of the audience (e.g. the clever caricatures of horror icons such as Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, and Peter Lorre).

Indeed, the greatest fun comes from Frankenweenie's allusiveness, as it chases genre vehicles like Godzilla, Gremlins, and Pet Sematary.  Most obviously and extensively, though, Burton's film references the Universal classics, and to no surprise climaxes with a scene of a torch-wielding mob harrying the "monster" at a windmill.  Overt hommage is also paid through the use of black and white.  This strategic colorlessness certainly gives the film a throwback look, yet also dulls the splendor of creation displayed onscreen, especially in contrast to the vibrant palettes of contemporary macabre-themed animated features like Hotel Transylvania and ParaNorman.

A word of forwarning: some of the action here--for instance, Mr. Whiskers' hideous mutation into a vampire bat-cat--will be a bit too intense for the youngest viewers.  But Burton fans and lovers of old-time horror will revel once the lively monsters start mashing.  Frankenweenie might not be quite on par with prior Burton efforts such as Corpse Bride (whose saucer-eyed, stick-limbed-figure animation style it shares) or The Nightmare Before Christmas, but promises to give theatergoers an enjoyable jolt this Halloween season.

Countdown: The Top 20 Jack Ketchum Works of Short Fiction--#5

[For the previous entry on the Countdown, click here.]

#5. "The Rifle"

Ketchum's 1996 tale (the lead story in the collection Peaceable Kingdom) opens with a divorced mother finding the eponymous firearm (which her ten-year-old son Danny has stolen from his grandfather's farm) hidden in a bedroom closet, "unexpected as a snake."  Danny has always been a troubled and troublemaking child (e.g., "stealing Milky Ways form the Pathmark Store"; "the fire he and Billy Berendt had set, yet denied they'd set, in the field behind the Catholic Church last year").  The "shrinks" and "counselors" his mom has already sent him to haven't really been able to help.  And now, with the theft of the rifle--and the loading of it with one of the shells he'd similarly purloined--Danny has gone too far.

Irate, the mother treks through the woods behind her home to confront Danny with this indisputable evidence of his bad behavior.  One of the key reasons the mother purchased her property was because she wanted her son to be close to the natural world and to learn from it ("Birth, death, sex, the renewal of the land, its fragility and its power, the chaos inside the order, the changes in people that came with the change of seasons."), but mom has no idea of the perversion/despoiling of nature she is about to uncover.  When she confronts Danny about the rifle, she notices
"something furtive" about him; he doesn't seem to want her to see inside the converted root cellar that serves as his clubhouse.  Forcing him to unlock his private sanctuary, the mother makes a horrific discovery:

She reached down and threw open one door and then the other and the first thing that hit her was the smell even with her sinus problem, the smell was rank and old and horrible beyond belief, and the second thing was the incredible clutter of rags and jars and buckets on the floor and the third was what she saw on the walls, hanging there from masonry nails pounded into the fieldstone, hung like decorations, like trophies, like the galleries she'd seen in castles in Scotland and England on her honeymoon and which were hunter's galleries.  A boy's awful parody of that.

Spotting this bloody tableau of animal torture, the mother is struck with a "stunning terror" of Danny, "[o]f this little boy who didn't even weigh ninety pounds yet."  Worse, she realizes not just what Danny is but "what he would become."  For his is the classic behavior of a nascent maniac, a serial killer in the making, and people like him "did not respond to treatment."  Seeing in Danny's cold gaze that "there was nothing to save in his nature," the mother abruptly raises the rifle and fires a killing shot into the boy's left eye. 

Exhibiting the toughest love, the mother makes a preemptive strike in defense of society's innocents.  But the woman (who locks up the root cellar Danny has fallen back into, and plans to report the boy as missing) has achieved anything but closure.  Going forward, she'll be forced to wonder, "How had it happened?"  How had Danny turned out so wrong?  Here the narrative recurs to a rhetoric of nature to form one of the finest closing sentences in the Ketchum canon: "It was a question she would ask herself, she thought, for a great many seasons after, as spring plunged into sweltering summer, as fall turned to winter again and the coldness of heart and mind set in for its long terrible duration."

In his Introduction to Peaceable Kingdom, Ketchum notes that author "Peter Straub once paid me the compliment of saying that he thought a lot of people came to my writing for the wrong reasons but stuck with me for the right ones."  "The Rifle" perhaps forms the perfect case in point.  Hearing that the story focuses on a sick kid given to animal mutilation, readers might expect to encounter depictions of grisly violence, which are in fact present ("Like the turtle the cats were nailed through all fours.  [Danny] had eviscerated both of them and looped their entrails around them and nailed the entrails to the walls at intervals so that the cat's were at the center of a kind of crude bull's eye.").  Still, it is the realism of natural setting and human psyche, the dramatization of the emotional anguish of a struggling mother, that makes "The Rifle" such a powerful and unforgettable short story.

Take a Laymon Walk

"That's so dangerous, Eddie.  Even a nice little town like this...it's probably not so nice in the middle of the night.  Probably no place is.  No place that has people, anyway."

And places that don't have people, I thought, probably have other dangerous things roaming the night.
 

These lines are drawn from Richard Laymon's frightening 2001 novel Night in the Lonesome October.  At the outset of the book, the just-dumped, heartbroken narrator decides to take a long walk late one October night, not realizing he is about to run across a horde of strange and dangerous folks (such as a Spandex-clad hag on a bicycle, a psychotic rapist, and a group of cannibalistic hobos residing under a bridge like some "gang of trolls").

Why do I bring this up?  Because I am encouraging you to follow Laymon's model and make your own nighttime trek this October.  What better way--and time of day--to take in the Halloween decorations spread across your hometown?  Such adornment isn't meant to be fleetingly glimpsed from a passing car, but rather gazed upon, its macabre artwork appreciated.  Moving about in solitary perambulation can only heighten the seasonal frisson, with the night breeze skittering brittle leaves across the sidewalk and seeping chill into your bones, with the adjacent shadows providing potential refuge for every lurking threat imaginable.  Anxious yet undaunted, you press on, braving the outer dark while your neighbors huddle indoors before the ersatz bonfires of their glowing TV screens.  Tirelessly you navigate the labyrinth of avenues, searching for the most ostentatious displays of Halloween spirit, the ritual gestures of the most dedicated yard-haunters.

I, for one, fully intend to venture out by my lonesome one night this October.  So should my posting to this blog come to an abrupt halt later this month, it just might mean that I ran afoul of some toothy trolls while out relishing the local nocturnal scene.

Cool Tees for the Halloween Season

Last year we had "Cruel Tees for the Halloween Season," but the following cotton shirts aren't wickedly funny, just plain wicked:

(available at Halloween T-Shirts)

 

 

 

(available at Foul Mouth Shirts)

 

 

 

 

(available at Rotten Cotton)

 

 

 

 (available at AllPosters)

 

 

 

(available at AllPosters) 

 

 

 

(available at Zazzle)

 

 

 

(available at Zazzle)

 

 

;  

(available at Sleepy Hollow Gifts)

Season's Greetings

It's the most wonderful month of the year...

Here at Macabre Republic we'll be celebrating the Halloween Season all October long with posts every single day.  The familiar Features will have an appropriately autumnal look, and there will be a new theme-week of posts beginning next week.  Also, the final five entries on the Countdown of the Top 20 Jack Ketchum Works of Short Fiction will be revealed by month's end.

The halls have already been decked here at Casa Macabre (special thanks to Lisa for her artistic eye and patient assistance), with a lot of fresh additions to last year's set-up.  Here's a photographic tour:

Outbreak

 



Not Ray Bradbury's Hallowene Tree

 

 



 

 



 

 

  

 



 

 

 



 

 



 

 



 

 



Little Lycanthrope

 

 

 



No Crows In Joe's Place

 

 



 

 



Unusual Suspects

 

  



  

 



 

 

 

 



 



October Clock

 

 



 

 





 

  



 

  



Frankenlamp & Minions

 

 



 

 

 



OK, Cast Or Get Off The Pot

 

 



 

  



Ghoul In The Water Stool

 

  



 

 



  

 



Pirate Of Decomposition

 



 

 



 

  



 

  



 

 



 

  



 

  

Grave Outlook