Lost Horrors: Mikey [1992]

To understand why, beyond its not being especially good, Mikey has become the forgotten piece of horror history that it is you need to know a little bit of recent UK history, so please bear with me.

In February 1993 a two year old boy named James Bulger was taken from a shopping centre in Merseyside.  Following this, Bulger was tortured and murdered by the side of a railway line.  This would have been a shocking crime anyway, but it was made all the more so when it became clear that it had been perpetrated by two ten year old boys; Robert Thompson and Jon Venables.  The British tabloid media, looking for easy answers as to why this tragedy had occurred, settled on pinning the blame on movies, and on Child's Play 3 in particular.  I've written in other places about the fact that this narrative, which, 20 years later, remains the one thing most Brits know about Child's Play 3 was based on nothing, but that didn't stop it from having an effect.

The British tabloids mounted a campaign to ban 'video nasties' and there was a bill introduced in the House of Commons that would have required any film "unsuitable for home viewing" to be banned on video, effectively outlawing any film not suitable for children.  The bill didn't pass, but there was a censorious climate and both distributors and the British Board of Film Classification seemed nervous.  Child's Play 3 was withdrawn by its distributor.  Warner Brothers delayed the video release of Natural Born Killers and certificates for films like Reservoir Dogs,  True Romance and Bad Lieutenant were delayed.

Mikey shouldn't have been caught up in this controversy.  It had received an uncut 18 certificate in November 1992, but by the time of the Bulger murder and the surrounding moral panic it had still not been screened in the UK.  In a move that, as far as I can tell, was completely without precedent, the BBFC director James Ferman, in direct response to a story in the Daily Mail, demanded the return of Mikey's certificate, retroactively banning it in the wake of the Bulger murder.  Having never been resubmitted to the board Mikey remains, in effect, banned.  So let's take a look at the film behind this strange case of censorship.

Honestly, it's hard not to be disappointed.  Mikey is very much a bog standard slasher movie, with little to distinguish it beyond its very silly plot, which is riddled with holes you could drive a truck through.  The film opens with nine year old Mikey (Brian Bonsall) killing his parents.  The stupid starts pretty early.  Mikey kills his mother by turning on her hairdryer and throwing it in the bath, except he doesn't throw it IN the bath, she catches it... and still gets electrocuted.  I'm not sure how that works.  Then Mikey makes his father fall through a glass door by having him slip on marbles he's left on the floor before bashing his head in with a baseball bat.  It's a pretty grim sequence, but hard to take seriously because the mechanics aren't especially credible in either death.  This is also where, both in its structure and in the motives of its leading character (Mikey accuses his parents of not loving him any more) the film's main influence becomes clear: it's The Stepfather, with a nine year old instead of Terry O'Quinn.

Following this opening the film settles into its main plot, with Mikey being adopted by a couple of nice, white, middle class people (Mimi Craven and John Diehl).  How this happens without them ever having met him before is never addressed, nor is the fact that they're not given the full facts on Mikey's past (his adoption records are sealed, because, sure, that's a good way to start addressing psychological trauma).  Anyway, Mikey's a perfect angel; he loves his new parents, does well at school, getting on with his teacher Miss Gilder (Ashley Laurence, mis-credited in the titles as Ashley Lawrence).  He makes friends with Ben, the kid next door (Whitby Hertford) and develops a crush on Ben's older sister Jessie (Josie Bisset).

Obviously things start to seem off, but nothing extreme enough to raise any concerns unless you've seen the opening of the film (or, I don't know, been told the details before you adopted the kid).  It takes nearly an hour for the film to ramp up again, and when it does... it's kind of stupid.  Okay, so when he kicks a radio into a jacuzzi to electrocute Jessie's boyfriend there's probably not much the victim could do, but the other victims often have nobody to blame but themselves.  HE'S NINE.  Okay, he hits his adoptive mother's hand with a hammer, which, surely, is her cue to slap him with the other hand and then take the hammer from him.  He's nine, she's surely going to be able to overpower him.  This goes on and on.  Ashley Laurence's death is also pretty funny, because all she has to do is take a side step, but no, the idiot plot is in full swing by this point. 

It's something of a pity that the film all but collapses under the weight of its own ridiculousness, because there are things to recommend it.  Brian Bonsall doesn't have an easy job here, but actually he does pretty well as Mikey.  He's convincing in the early scenes when we're supposed to sense something under the surface when Mikey is playing nice and he's got a few chilling moments ("I'm watching Mikey's funniest home videos") before the ending sees him having to resort to nonsensical pre-kill one liners ("Miss Gilder you're the best teacher I've ever had, but there is one thing you never taught me... How to die!")

The adults also do pretty well, given the kind of film this is.  Diehl and Craven both come off as almost negligently unaware when it comes to some of Mikey's disturbing behavior, but that's the fault of the writing.  Acting wise, they do their job well enough, and Craven at least seems to be enjoying some of the silliness of her part.  Josie Bisset also has to battle some cringemaking dialogue, especially in her first scene, in which Mikey and Ben dupe her into giving Mikey mouth to mouth, but again, she's fine in her part, and more than capable of being the crush-worthy girl next door.  What the film really misses is a formidable final girl, probably because, since Mikey is nine, she'd kill him without any fuss.  It seems, for a while, that Ashley Laurence is being set up for this role, but it never pays off in the way you'd like it to.

You can see why, in the wake of the Bulger murder, this film would have given the UK censors pause.  Silly as it is, the fact that the central theme of a child murdering people would have meant that the contentious elements of the film could never have been cut around.  Today it looks quaint.  The violence isn't all that graphic, and is surprisingly infrequent until the last half hour.  Today the theme would be unlikely to trouble the BBFC as much as imitable techniques (the electrocutions) and a shot that clearly shows Bonsall in the same frame as a topless Mimi Craven.

Ultimately, Mikey is little more than a forgettable slasher, and it would likely have fallen even further into obscurity but for its unfortunate timing.  It has some interesting elements, but even Bonsall's solid performance does little to make a great case for lifting this one out of the basement in which it has spent the past 20 years.

Lost Horrors: Carrie [2002]

In this series I will be looking at horror films that have fallen through the cracks; the obscure, the underseen, the underrated, the lost.

As the latest version of Carrie is due to be released in the UK in just a few weeks I thought it would be a good idea to kick this column off with a look at the mostly forgotten TV Movie from 2002, which was apparently supposed to kick off a Carrie TV series.

This largely forgotten version feels not so much like a remake of Brian DePalma's film as it does a modern (well modern in 2002, which is surprisingly old fashioned now, as this is a high school without smartphones or even YouTube) adaptation of Stephen King's novel.  Writer Bryan Fuller and director David Carson retain a few things that DePalma jettisoned, take a different tone with some of the performances and update some of the dialogue intelligently.  Unfortunately this is not to say that the film is a total success, but it's seldom less than interesting.

The first place that this Carrie really scores is in the casting of the title role.  Sissy Spacek is indelible as Carrie White, making the part a mountain for any actress to climb.  Angela Bettis, who was cast on the strength of her work in May though Carrie would be seen first by the public, is ideal casting.  She's not Spacek and doesn't attempt to copy her, but Bettis shares some inherent qualities that are integral to the role.  Make no mistake, Angela Bettis is a strikingly good looking young woman, but her beauty has a quiet, almost mousy, quality that easily blends in to the background, especially when you set her against the likes of Emilie DeRavin's dolled up Chris Hargensen.  You can believe that Bettis' Carrie would be ignored at high school, were it not for the fact that she is strange and that her peers are aware of her restrictive upbringing with her extremely conservative religious mother (played here by Patricia Clarkson).  Bettis' look also works in another way; her transformation into the pretty girl who goes to prom is both credible and a real change of look.

Of course Bettis' performance goes much more than skin deep, and in this way she's also very different from her predecessor.  Spacek's Carrie always seems scared, but there is something different about Bettis in the role; an anger that seems ever present and a knowledge that that anger can be destructive.  This leads to a subtly different take on the scenes of telekinesis.  Spacek's Carrie seems to gradually gain control over her powers, but we never feel that from Bettis.  Even at the prom she seems overtaken, frozen by her powers.  

An additional scene in which Sue Snell (a creditable performance from Kandyse McClure) helps Carrie pick out a lipstick for the dance adds colour and a little more social nous to the character.  There are a few additions and changes like this, and most are welcome.  New dialogue when Chris Hargensen's plan for revenge against Carrie is first mooted is both period appropriate and funny “We should have a rule: If they do something in a Freddie Prinze Jr. movie, we're not allowed to do it in real life.”  Even better is the extending of the bullying of Carrie, which takes the 'plug it up' moment and – though it depicts it less explicitly – makes it more public and just as cruel.  There are nice little moments scattered throughout the film that seperate it from the DePalma version and make Carrie a subtly different character (her line about breasts to her mother is also extended and works really well).

There are two big changes.  One works reasonably well, the other almost brings the whole film crashing down.  Carrie, the novel, is one of Stephen King's most unconventionally structured; written as if pieced together from reports about the prom incident and what went before it.  This film attempts to reflect that by having survivors interviewed by the Police.  It's a nice idea, and gives the film a different feel from the original, but the internal logic of the structure isn't always maintained and it does rely on some patchy performances when it cuts away from Kandyse McClure.  The ending, on the other hand, is laugh out loud ludicrous, so bad it nearly retrospectively destroys what was good about the film in the first place.  I'll just say that the last five minutes attempt to set up a TV series that would have co-starred Sue Snell and leave you to imagine the plot contortions and how awful they are.

This version of Carrie is somewhat schizophrenic in its quality.  You can enjoy the coiled menace of Patricia Clarkson's performance as Margaret White, which takes a radically different approach to the more nakedly unhinged Piper Laurie to fine effect, but at the same time the cramped framing – frequently in close up – and general try too hard feeling of David Carson's direction can be off putting.  To his credit Carson doesn't imitate Brian DePalma, but the effects he sometimes tries look cheesy and there is just a sense that he's overegging the pudding through his direction because TV rules mean that he can't show much violence.  There are other problems too, notably with the supporting cast and especially with Jesse Cadotte, who is terrible as Billy Nolan, and makes you long for something as restrained as John Travolta's hammy turn in the original film.

I only discovered that this version of Carrie existed because I'm a fan of Angela Bettis, but does it deserve to be dug up?  I think so.  It's a long, long way from perfect and it can be a frustrating watch because you want to shout at the director and the editor, especially in the last five minutes.  However, the leading performances are excellent and the film distinguishes itself enough from the DePalma version that it does feel like it can stand on its own.  At the very least it's an interesting curio for fans of Bettis, Clarkson and King.