HoopTober 8: Mosquito Takes Mandragon

Movie 45
Six decades: 2nd of 2 films from the 90's

Around the time we entered the early 90's I was entering my mid-teens, and I was feeling a bit counter-cultural. I grew my hair long and wore black t-shirts and flannelette shirts (we called them flanno's) and I started smoking pot (on the rare occasions I could get it) and I congratulated myself for being somewhat edgy (I thought).

This is a long-winded way of saying, when it came to movies, MERYL STREEP WAS RIGHT OUT as far as I was concerned, so there was no way I was watching Death Becomes Her, even if that image of Goldie Hawn with a big hole in her midriff was a little intriguing.

Actually, I'm still kind of sick of the sight of Streep - that's how overexposed she used to be - and I'd question her casting in this as some kind of sex-appeal-oozing vamp but, I have to admit, she's pretty damn good. And so is Goldie Hawn. Bruce Willis, again cast more for box-office appeal than any kind of innate suitability for the role, also manages to make it work.

We are clearly in the realm of overt farce when it comes to Death Becomes Her, which is something that I can appreciate much more now than I could back then (like, seriously, this is the same year as Reservoir Dogs, my mind was on entirely different things than movies like this). So, one could argue that the casting of very familiar faces in the lead roles is entirely appropriate, as this is more of a "knowing wink" kind of film than anything we're supposed to get too swept away by.

And it works pretty damn well as that. Despite setting up a rather predictable premise at first, Zemeckis throws this thing through the gears at dizzying speed until we are spinning right off the edge of Mulholland Drive and into some kind of wacky Hollywood Grand Guignol riff on the Twilight Zone. By the time Isabella Rossellini shows up with nothing but a necklace covering her boobs and starts giving out immortality potions, I was well and truly on board (I mean, even the teenage me would have been totally rapt at that point).

This is really all a bit silly and not particularly horrifying, but it's not trying to be. It was probably seen as an example of the kind of aimless mainstream Hollywood self-indulgence which the indie boom wiped out in the following years, and maybe this is not the kind of film we're likely to see too much of these days, but that now seems something of a shame to me.

It's not totally my kind of thing, but maybe that's partly why I enjoyed this so much.