Harefooted Halloween: Communion

What I Liked: The material is interesting because you don’t know for sure if what you’re seeing is real.  Chris Walken (King of New York, Batman Returns) isn’t sure himself right up until the end.  Did he get abducted by aliens or is he fucking crazy?

Walken looks like he had a blast making this.  He gets to go through an entire gamut of emotions like confusion, joy, anger, delusion, understanding, denial, etc.  It seems like director Philippe Mora (The Howling II…Your Sister Is a Werewolf) let him loose and trusted that whatever Walken would do would be the right thing.  Half the time it does feel like the right thing and the other half…well it’s still fun to watch.

What I Didn’t Like: The alien effects aren’t very good, especially the thinner ones that appear to be little more than marionettes.  Although, I can see an argument that the low budget effects makes this even stranger and blurs the line between reality and hallucination.

They showed too much of the aliens and the inside of their ship.  Being so generous with this footage seems to point more in the direction that everything you’re seeing really happened.  If the filmmakers had been more ambiguous and thrown in some shadows and obstructions ‘n shit then I think the movie as a whole would’ve had more of an impact.  It’s really because I’m not a huge fan of the alien designs here that I think it would’ve been beneficial to leave it more to the imagination.

The Eric Clapton soundtrack was a huge mistake and undercuts the otherworldly mood the film sets.  It was fine in the drug fueled 70’s set Rush (1991) but not in a modern day (1989) alien abduction movie.

Overall Impression: First, I liked this picture and enjoyed the serious direction they went with an alien abduction/encounter.  However, there’s certainly a B movie edge and in this case that’s unfortunate.  In the hands of a top grade director and a better cinematographer this could’ve been a masterpiece.  The casting is great and most of the script is good.  It just needed better technical execution and a few storytelling tweaks.  The potential can be easily seen throughout.

It’s a fascinating idea to have a guy not know, and not want to believe, that he was abducted and experimented on by aliens.  His experiences keep coming back to him and he can’t shake it.  There are horror elements here and there like intrusion, mystery of the unknown, traumatization, questionable sanity and others that give the movie a dark tone.  But I wouldn’t classify this as straight horror.  More like a drama with a couple packets of eeriness mixed in. 

This is all based on writer Whitley Strieber and his family’s real life experiences which makes things all the more intriguing.  He wrote a book about it (interestingly he also wrote the novels “Wolfen” and “The Hunger”) and claims everything in there actually happened.  It’s a little hard to buy considering Strieber is in the horror writing business but it’s still a curious testimonial.   

This is another one like TheWicker Man that gives such a different spin on horror that you could even say it doesn’t belong in the genre.  This is a tough recommendation but if you’re feeling adventurous this is a nice change of pace.