Hooptober... And Then There Were Nine

53rd Kill

Brad Dourif is on fire in this movie.

Bugnuts screaming insanity painted in dayglo goop and neon fire, with lashings of terrifying paranoia. The institutions of societal authority are amoral and murderous and there is no escape from this grotesque descent into personal hell. Tobe creates a dystopic vision so archly nightmarish and bombastically potent that it was always doomed to be dismissed as gutter trash even by the horror literati.

I take some solace in knowing that there are others like me for whom Hooper's specific film-making aesthetic is deeply powerful. At this point, many have acquired a refined taste for film-makers like Dario Argento, a visionary whose best work can so easily be dismissed as clumsy or inept by those who aren't inured to his off-kilter personal stylism. I don't know why people find it harder to afford the same adjustment in expectations for Hooper - maybe because he's not Italian and the equivalent idiosyncracy can't be tolerated in a non-foreigner.

Tobe's movies need to be watched in a different way. Realism is so fucking far from the objective here, you must revel in its absence. And what possibilities that throws up for us - a Hooper film is a trip into the darker recesses of your sub-consciousness. Spontaneous Combustion is a filmic manifestation of the resonance of theta state brainwaves - if the sonic evidence of your dream-mind could somehow be transformed into radio communication and transmitted onto the screen, this is what it might look and sound like.

A perfect counterpoint to the forced clinical detachment of Scanners, Hooper takes all that Cronenberg dialled down and twists those dials all the way up the other way. This fire literally bursting out of characters' bodies is a pain beyond imagining, and this movie makes you feel it. And sustain it, because water makes it worse. What also makes it worse is that this horrific mutation is being actively encouraged by the sly, duplicitous agents of American authority - government departments, the military, doctors: all of these institutions are blended into one malevolent Big Brother in Spontaneous Combustion. The more their victims suffer, the more they smile.

Don't get me wrong. Not everything Hooper made was a triumph, particularly towards the end of his career, when he was forced to compromise so much of his vision and when surely his personal energy and drive had diminished. But Spontaneous Combustion is him still tearing his uniquely nihilistic furrow through American genre cinema. I think it's fucking awesome.

Best Kill (may contain traces of spoiler)

So many horrifying deaths by combustion - the opening one of David's parents in flashback hits particularly hard because it is so unexpected and because of how it just applies a literal blowtorch to a scene of domestic happiness. But I think the pick of the bunch is probably Jon Cypher (a cast stand-out for his oily villainy) staggering around, wielding a glowing green hypodermic like a char-grilled Herbert West, who finally gets his just desserts flaming out bent double over a pallet as lumpy green glow-in-the-dark custard pours out of him. Nothing like a bit of crème anglais, flambé!