Saturday, March 16, 2024

PAN (2015)

 






PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*


SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

In PETER PAN J. M. Barrie provided the perfect mythic representation of the child's desire to be free of all parental constrictions and go seeking adventures. Barrie clearly showed that this desire was ambivalent, as the Lost Boys do miss the blandishments of home life. Nevertheless, Peter Pan still incarnates all the rebellious aspects of male childhood-- vanity, quarrelsomeness, and even a tendency to "edit" his memory to erase experiences that don't suit the young hero. A prototype of Peter was a very small child, but clearly, in both the play and book, Barrie aged the official version up, since it would hardly be credible for anyone younger than a preteen to go around crossing swords with pirates.

One's enjoyment of PAN may be affected by the viewer's insistence on all versions of the title character following the Barrie template in terms of character, for the Peter of director Joe Wright and writer Jason Fuchs lacks any vanity, adventurousness, or lapses in memory. Fuchs apparently decided to invert Barrie's idea of Peter Pan's origins, in which Peter deserted Earth for Neverland because he thought his mother had left him alone. In this movie, infant Peter is left on the doorstep of an orphanage by his mother, who has a complicated history of her own. This Peter (Levi Miller) grows to ten years of age under the control of corrupt and greedy nuns, but he always remains steadfast to the idea that his true mother will someday come for him again.

In the film's most confusing plot-thread, it's suggested that the nuns are in cahoots with the pirates of Neverland, who stage a raid upon the orphanage one night. From the deck of their ship-- able to fly around the Earth-skies thanks to fairy dust-- the pirates cast down sky-hooks and simply snatch several boys from their beds. 

However, the flying pirate ship is under the command of a captain named Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman), who's never expressly said to be identical with the 17th century buccaneer. Blackbeard and his crew of rowdies (among whom is comic-relief character "Mister Smee") periodically kidnap young boys to work in the Neverland mines. Within these mines are deposits of Pixum, concatenations of fairy dust which confer the power of flight upon Blackbeard's ship and some degree of youth upon the captain. The script never elaborates upon the exact relationship between the race of fairies and these mineral deposits.

While Peter and his fellow orphans work the mnies, Peter meets Indiana Jones. Okay, it's James Hook, but actor Garrett Hedlund plays him exactly like the Harrison Ford character. Hook seems to be the only adult in the mines, but he never says how he came to be in Neverland. Peter and Hook manage to escape with the help of Smee.

All three are captured by a tribe of "savages" who are perpetually at war with the pirates. (The producers made this tribe loosely multi-racial and elided all representations of their being Barrie's Native Americans, clearly seeking to avoid any negative blowback-- which they got anyway.) Princess Tiger Lily (Rooney Mara) requires Hook to fight the tribe's best warrior before all three will be put to death. However, though Hook acquits himself well the trio are saved by a token suggests that Peter may be a predicted savior called "The Pan."

Peter's true origins here are even more wildly revisionist than his relationship with James Hook (which had seen a better revision in 2011's NEVERLAND).It turns out that that his beloved mother was a mortal brought to Neverland by her lover Blackbeard. (The nature of their relationship remains as murky as any accounting for the pirate captain's gaining access to the Never-verse.) However, the mother, name of Mary, fell in love with a male fairy, and the two of them conceived Peter. The fairy perished as the result of his having assumed a human form (curiously, neither Peter nor the script is the least bit curious about Peter's pater). Mary took shelter with the savages, and at some point managed to return to the Earth-realm, where she left infant Peter on the orphanage's doorstep. Then she was accidentally slain by Blackbeard, though the aggrieved Peter later manages to see his mother again, after a fashion.

All of these revelations are a set-up for an admittedly rousing conclusion, in which Blackbeard and his horrible hearties invade the fairy kingdom to gain more Pixum. Peter and Tiger Lily seek to warn the fairies while Hook deserts them, trying to find a way to his own universe. Peter and Tiger Lily fall afoul of Blackbeard, but they're given respite by Han Solo. Okay, it's Hook reprising the Millennium Falcon rescue from STAR WARS, but with a second flying pirate ship to match that of Blackbeard. This long climactic sequence-- during which Peter finally master his nascent ability to fly, here an inheritance from his fairy father-- is easily the best part of the movie, and does a lot to redeem the script's many plot holes. Some critics complained of too much CGI, but really, how else but through computer animation could anyone bring to life the sight of two flying frigates having a dogfight? Alas, while I found PAN to be good popcorn entertainment as long as one ignored the plot holes and the non-traditional characterization of Peter Pan, the film tanked.

I ventured my considered opinion that probably the main reason the filmmakers elided Native Americans from this PAN adaptation was to avoid controversy. Given all the belated condemnations of Disney's PETER PAN for its use of "redmen," there's nearly no chance that PAN could have dodged recriminations no matter how "respectfully" they chose to depict the tribe. So the PAN tribe becomes an unspecified polyglot, with White actress Mara assuming the role of Tiger Lily-- and this got the film accused of "whitewashing." There are real incidents of whitewashing worth citing, but here the casting had nothing to do with denying some Native American actress the role, but with trying to rework the whole tribe to stem the tide of controversy. As it happens, Tiger Lily is a strong enough role that any Native American performer ought to have considered it honorable to play the character (and indeed, few Tiger Lilies in film-history have been real Native Americans). But I can well understand the producers not wanting to take the chance. In any case, Mara's shipboard duels with Jackman's Blackbeard are one of the highlights of the movie. It's also of passing interest that both Hedlund and Mara, whose characters have a maybe-romantic interaction, were both about thirty years old in 2015, so there's no sense that this Tiger Lily will ever become Wendy's potential rival for an older Peter. Also, it's interesting that the Princess claims to have been trained in fighting by the deceased Mary, which gives Tiger Lily a slightly maternal resonance re: Peter.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

THE ZEBRA KILLER (1974)

 






PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*


Once more a streaming service has unearthed a specimen of "weird cinema" for all interested parties, one that, from what I've heard, has never received an American VHS or DVD release.

Slightly before he directed the well known "blaxploitation" film ABBY, grindhouse veteran William Girdler (a White guy, incidentally) made this obscure low-budget psycho-thriller, starring Austin (ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13) Stoker. The city of Louisville is plagued by a serial killer, but with a difference. The killer not only executes various victims with no known connection to one another, he uses different murder-methods each time. Stoker's character, Black police detective Frank Savage, is assigned to find the killer, alongside his cheery White partner. Strangely, even though the police captain is constantly raging about the need to end the threat, there's only one mention of the possibility of other cops pursuing the case, and nothing, least of all a task force, comes of it.

As I recall, the big reveal turns out to be the old "killing off the jurors who sentenced his father" trope, though Girdler, who also provided the script, doesn't spend much time on the murderer's motivations. Even less well explained is his peculiar disguise. Though the Zebra Killer (never called that in the film) is a White guy (James Carroll Pickett, who only acted in two other films, both directed by Girdler), during his crimes he dons blackface and a big Afro, and affects a stereotypical Black accent. To complicate things further, Zebra Killer holds a grudge against Savage. Zebra not only calls Savage to berate him with racist insults and to give him clues, he kidnaps the detective's girlfriend and threatens to kill and/or rape her. Zebra has one long scene where he rants at his captive about race relations, but nothing he says possesses any psychological heft, and he doesn't even try to assail her in any way. Did Girdler, without saying so and perhaps losing his grindhouse audience, want to imply Zebra had some negative compensation issues? The world will never know. But Zebra's attire and varied killing methods make him an uncanny psycho, even though none of the methods themselves are uncanny.

In contrast to the majority of American films in this subgenre, the script treats Zebra's racism as an unusual deviance. Savage gets along fine with his White partner, and they toss racial barbs at one another like a low-budget Culp and Cosby. Savage is a cool, laid-back hero even though it takes him a really long time to get anything done. Girdler shows a scene of Savage practicing karate at a dojo to foreground a later battle (though not a climactic one) in which Savage nearly beats the stuffing out of Zebra. Possibly Pickett simply didn't know how to do anything in a staged fight but fall down? This means that Girdler, after giving Savage several chances to overcome his opponent, then has to let Zebra whip out a hidden knife and wound the detective, so that the killer can escape for the final reckoning later.

It's an odd movie, which invokes racial tension verbally but barely shows any incidents. In fact, Savage even shakes down a Black guy purely on suspicion, which most blaxploitation heroes would never do. There's a comic scene in which the two detectives come across a pimp (familiar face D'Urville Martin) who's being beat up by five of his hookers. The cops' solution is to call a paddy wagon, pile the pimp and the hookers into the same van, and let the girls continue beating their victim. Nevertheless, I rate the film's mythicity as "fair" simply because it captures some of the sociological dynamics of the period.

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES (2014)

 





PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*


I seem to remember that this reboot got an unusual amount of fan-hate back in the day, though I admit I didn't see it in the theater. I stated my opinion the TMNT franchise back in my review of the 1990 live-action adaptation-- that it's fun but lightweight. As long as the four jive-talking terrapins and their rat-daddy keep their standard characterizations consistent and there's lots of high-octane action, what's to hate?

Possibly 2014 got some hate just because it's become standard for critics to despite anything produced by Michael Bay. I've seen my share of Bay films that were so hyper-active that they were visually incomprehsible. But 2014, directed by Jonathan Liebesman and scripted by three writers that seemed to get the Turtles mythos pretty well, was quite easy to follow. Of course, the conflict is standard Supevillain 101. This time, the Shredder (Tohoro Masamune) isn't interested in petty matters like seducing young teens to a life of crime, as he was in 1990. He, his Foot Clan, and a new mad scientist (William Fichtner) go straight to the city-blackmailing option, planning to unleash a radioactive mutagen on New York. 

Of course, being the righteous reptilians they are, the Turtles start assailing his operations, and this attracts the attention of reporter April O'Neil (Megan Fox). In fact, 2014 somewhat improves upon the usual origin in which April has no common backstory with the five mutants. Here, she's the daughter of a scientist who was involved in the experiment that created the mutagen, and he was killed by colleague Eric Sacks (who has "bad guy written all over him from his first scene). In April's first encounter with the vigilantes, she recognizes their names, having known all five experimental animals in her dad's lab. It's pretty improbable when the script claims that rat-sensei Splinter actually remembers Aoril from before he was mutated, but since I liked a lot of the humor (particularly the joke about the "99-cheese pizza"), I'll give that one a pass.

I also thought that all the big honking action-scenes were well done though not exceptional, and commensurate with what Michael Bay's fans expect of his films. The script is weak on the motivations of both Shredder and Sacks; they shake down cities just because they can, and Shredder's daughter Karai (Minae Noji) is reduced to the role of a bare functionary. Shredder wouldn't make my list of great comics-villains, but on occasion he does have a grandiose quality. 2014 just turns him into a human Transformer for the big fight-scenes.

Fox makes a decent support-heroine here, and Will Arnett provides a lot of "confused guy over his head" humor. I take away a few points because the Foot Clan aren't dressed as traditional ninjas, which is really about the only charm they have. The film was a box office success but the follow-up was less so, killing this reboot series, though another would appear seven years later.


Wednesday, March 13, 2024

HELLBOY: THE GOLDEN ARMY (2006)

 






PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*


HELLBOY 2 picks up some time after the conclusion of the first film, which ended, in part, with the decision of Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) to accept Hellboy (Ron Perlman) as her lover. Guillermo Del Toro, who wrote an original story with the franchise's creator Mike Mignola, is careful to follow through on all the emotional beats established for the hero and his cast of support characters, including amphibious Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) and fastidious manager Manning (Jeffrey Tambor). Unfortunately, I don't think Del Toro paid nearly as much attention to the main conflict of his story.

The first HELLBOY had a rough unity, in that the hero loses his adoptive father therein and then must overcome a sort of "bad father," an occultist who brought the young demon into the Earth-plane. The conflict once again has apocalyptic consequences for the survival of mankind, but Del Toro's script fails to give his basic idea any deep resonance, and I give the film a fair mythicity only for its romance-elements with respect to both Hellboy and Abe Sapien. 

It seems that in antiquity there was a great battle in which archaic humans attempted, for reasons unknown, to exterminate all the various supernatural beings of Earth, such as trolls, ogres and fairies. Balor (Roy Dotrice), King of Faerie, has his smiths create an unstoppable army of golden clockwork soldiers (not fully seen until the film's last half hour). This "golden army" decimates the human forces, who are saved only because compassionate Balor spares the race. A truce is forged between the humans and their supernatural opponents, and it endures until the early 21st century.

Contemporary humans are only marginally aware that supernatural entities still exist-- except for those working for the B.P.R.D., such as Hellboy-- and it's dubious as to whether any of them even remember the truce. But surprisingly, it's a Prince of Faerie, Nuada (Luke Goss), who decides that he wants to activate the Golden Army and expunge humankind. Why? He references human expansion and their repugnant "shopping malls," but clearly Del Toro didn't bother giving his villain a strong motive. In any case, Balor doesn't want to make war on humans, so his son kills him. Nuada's twin sister Nuala (Anne Watson), despite her somewhat diffident affection for her brother, flees the faerie court with a device Nuada needs in order to activate the killer robots.

I'm not clear on why Nuada releases various boogiemen into the Earth-plane, such as a swarm of tiny horrors called "tooth fairies." That might make sense if Nuala was hiding on Earth, but we later learn she's hiding in a corner of Faerie called "the troll market." It looks like the only reason for various monsters to show up on Earth is so that the B.P.R.D. has something to investigate, and so that Hellboy and his buddies have someone to fight. The incursions cause the occult-hunters to check out the troll market, find Nuala, get the lowdown on Nuada's plans, and start making counter-plans. Oh, and both Nuala and Abe Sapien fall for each other. (There's a very light incestuous current between the twins, mostly evidenced on Nuada's side, but Del Toro does not develop this element dramatically.)

Instead of building up the main menace, the director piles on the workplace drama and comedy. In addition to various flareups from Liz (who has a bun in her oven and doesn't know it initially), Hellboy also has to cope with a new commander. This is Johann Kraus, essentially a ghost who speaks with a German accent despite inhabiting a suit of armor. Krauss, ostensibly based on a separate Mignola character, adds some good tension to the mix, but regrettably he also supplies more evidence that Del Toro was more taken with doing his character-scenes than with building up the plot.

In contrast to most other cinematic menaces, the invincible Golden Army, or a couple of soldiers thereof, are only activated for a few minutes, which doesn't help to sell them as a major danger. Hellboy, after coping with a near-death wound, enjoys a climactic duel with Nuada. But though he saves the world from the Golden Army, his victory costs Abe his first love.

Even when I saw ARMY in a theatre, I was underwhelmed. However, in 2006 it made a substantial profit, so obviously the audience as a whole liked it, and even critics were reasonably positive. Yet for the next thirteen years up until the 2019 reboot of the franchise, Del Toro couldn't get a sequel greenlighted. I speculate that some unfathomable office politics kept HELLBOY III from happening. According to Del Toro's statements, he might have followed through on some of the ideas alluded to in the first film, regarding Hellboy's special destiny. But there's no knowing if that take would have been good. Wiki supplied a writeup of other ideas Del Toro considered for Number Two before settling on the clockwork army, and all of those ideas seem fairly pedestrian. I'm clearly in the minority in my preference for the 2019 effort, since that film flopped at the BO. Still, all the "special destiny" tropes are still ripe for harvesting, so Del Toro's failure to pursue that notion doesn't mean it will never be realized.


HELLBOY (2004)

 






PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*


The first adaptation of Dark Horse's HELLBOY franchise is loosely based on HELLBOY: SEED OF DESTRUCTION, a rough "origin-story" produced by creator/artist Mike Mignola and writer John Byrne. The movie script by Peter Briggs and director Guillermo Del Toro improves on the original in many ways, improving on the dramatic dynamics of the principal characters. 

The titular character is a humanoid demon with horns and a tail, discovered in child-form by his adoptive father Professor Broom in 1944. Sixty years later, the adult Hellboy (Ron Perlman) is a big, swaggering fellow who, due to his not blending well with common humanity, has devoted his life to the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense. Broom is at once the director of the agency and a nurturing but demanding father. In addition to various human agents, the BPRD, dedicated to investigating paranormal phenomena on Planet Earth, are two other super-powered individuals: pyrokinetic Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) and amphibious Abe Sapien (Doug Jones). 

As it happens, in 2004 one of the occultists responsible for Hellboy's presence on Earth-- none other than a very long-lived Grigori Rasputin (Karel Roden)-- is bringing about a plot to unleash a world-destroying demon, the Ogdru Jahad. This involves having a lesser demon, who looks like a cross between The Alien and The Predator (but bulkier than the "Predalien" of three years later). This demon, Sammael by name, also lays eggs to produce duplicates of itself, though I think the only real function Sammael serves is to give Hellboy a heavy-duty sparring partner.

Nevertheless, precisely because of the rough family dynamics of the Briggs-Del Toro script-- which includes a possible romantic relationship between Liz and Hellboy-- the rock-em-sock-em battles possess good human context, as well as some lively humor. (The "no tongue" line is among the best.) Though given a lot of support by the other actors-- Jeffrey Tambor as a fussy managerial type, Rupert Evans as a human agent who might offer Hellboy some romantic competition-- HELLBOY is largely Ron Perlman's show. Once or twice he verges on scenery-chewing, but it's somewhat inevitable given all the intensive makeup effects. Possibly it helps that here he could play an ass-kicking hero miles away from his soulful incarnation of the similarly makeup-heavy Vincent of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.

The film was successful enough to spawn a sequel with essentially the same cast, more on which anon.




Tuesday, March 12, 2024

DUNE, PART ONE (2021), DUNE, PART TWO (2024)

 






PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, metaphysical, sociological*


I may revisit these two films someday if I ever get a chance to reread Frank Herbert's original DUNE novel. I have read the novel at least three times, so I'm more than familiar than with the content, but I want to establish that this brief review is based on my memories of the book's incidents.

In short, I found PART ONE dull. But I held off on writing a review because I wanted to know the totality of what director/co-writer Denis Villeneueve made of Herbert's epic novel. But nothing in PART TWO does anything to change my dominant opinion, that Villeneuve takes an epic and turns it into a boring travelogue. As I write this, though, PART TWO has proven just as much a success with the mass audience as PART ONE, and so I have to conclude that many, many viewers are seeing something in the Villeneuve translation that I don't see.

I don't despise this adaptation, but from start to finish I found it no better than any of the others. Indeed, though the 1984 David Lynch version-- which I also have not yet reviewed-- at least is an exciting thrill-ride, and like the book is never dull despite its slower and more meditative sequences. 

I don't claim to be an expert in cinematic aesthetics, but I believe that I've honed my own definition of what makes artful visual compositions. In both movies, I found just one scene where I thought Villeneuve realized the visual potential of the novel. When the Atreides family first arrives on Arrakis, there's a lovely contrast between rows and rows of armored guards, the epitome of male power, and a coterie of Bene Gessert, all in filmy veils, the incarnation of feminine influence. Every else in both films is just long tracking shots of deserts in Namibia and Abu Dhabi. And I frankly found the CGI sandworms underwhelming.

Villeneuve is also "meh" on the dynamics of the spacefaring families of the Atreides and the Harkonnens, and of the Empire as a whole (represented by Emperor Christopher Walken). Clearly his passion was to capture Herbert's nomadic Fremen culture, and some of his dramatizations of that culture are appealing, though not compelling throughout the length of either movie. I found the casting variable as well. Timothy Challomee may have been going for playing Paul Atreides as the deeply conflicted moral hero that Villeneuve desired, but he comes off as merely vacillating. Javier Bardem plays the Fremen leader Stilgar as a superstitious believer in messianic prophecies, ardently invested in the idea that Paul is the Fremen's new messiah. That may indeed be the way the book portrays him, but it's a one-note performance in these movies. Most of the other performances are no better, though Josh Brolin brings a rare humanity to his role of Gurney Halleck.

Technically, the best performance is that of Zendaya, an actor whom I had not liked in any previous work. Of course she gets more good scenes because Villeneuve builds her up far more than Herbert did in the book. I strongly suspect that, despite Villeneuve's assertions of fidelity to Herbert, the director wanted Zendaya's Chani to be a more authoritative figure. The actor gives a good multi-level performance, far from any of the tedious "girl bosses" of the MCU, so at least Villenueve avoided that pitfall. Still, the book DUNE does not end with Chani being pissed off because the victorious Paul must make a political marriage to secure his power. Villeneueve clearly elides Herbert's claim that Chani will become Paul's concubine while the marriage will be "in name only," because that sort of arrangement would not fly in the modern political climate. So the two DUNEs in my view are compromised on many levels, though the political compromises are far less significant than the aesthetic shortcomings.

When all's said and done, maybe Villeneuve was just damn lucky that the commercial audience was in the mood for a quasi-LORD OF THE RINGS experience.




Monday, March 11, 2024

THE VAMPIRE LOVERS (1970)





PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*


I find the above movie poster particularly amusing, not just because it promises the customer salacious sadomasochistic pleasures nowhere in the actual film, but also tries to claim that this supposed exhibition of pure pulp exploitation is "not for the mentally immature."

On this blog I ended up reviewing Hammer's "Karnstein trilogy"in reverse order, starting with TWINS OF EVIL  and then getting round to LUST FOR A VAMPIRE. I'm sure that I procrastinated on the first film in the loose trilogy because it was the only one directly derived from LeFanu's 1872 book CARMILLA, which I've recently reviewed here. 

In my re-read I concluded that LeFanu was very much in love with all manner of ambiguity, in strong contrast with the much more straightforward action of Bram Stoker's more famous vampire-novel. Even my vague memories of Roy Ward Baker's VAMPIRE LOVERS told me that it would certainly follow the model of Stoker more than that of Carmilla's creator. 

Many of the elements LeFanu saved for CARMILLA's big finish are moved forward by scripter Tudor Gates (also credited with the other two Karnstein flicks). For instance, a vague "vampire hunter" who only appears in the book's last few chapters is elaborated into a major supporting character, one Baron Hartog, in LOVERS' prologue. Some decades before the movie's main action, Hartog hunts down and decapitates a blonde vampiress, possibly some relation of the Karnstein family of fiends. The scene's only purpose seems to be to reassure the reader that the monster of the main story will meet a similar defeat.

In the book, the action remains entirely focused upon the insular world in which teenaged viewpoint character Laura lives, and she only hears, without any understanding, news of various fatalities, like the death of the niece of the neighboring General Spielsdorf. In LOVERS, the main action begins at the lavish home of Spielsdorf (Peter Cushing), and it's Spielsdorf's pretty daughter-- oddly given the name Laura-- who is the first definite victim of Carmilla Karnstein (Ingrid Pitt). Viewers are shown a woman who purports to be Carmilla's mother-- though she may just be some random bloodsucker-- and this "countess" contrives to leave Carmilla in the General's care, to ensure that Carmilla can get close to her chosen prey. Gates even repeats another tidbit from LeFanu's wrap-up, to the effect that vampires sometimes exsanguinate their victims right away, while other times they "court" their prey with exaggerated romantic rituals.

Laura, of course, is one of Carmilla's quickie meals. (For clarity's sake, I'm passing over the other two names Carmilla uses in her endeavors.) Her main victim, the one she courts for most of the movie, is renamed "Emma" (Madeline Smith) and she, like the book's heroine, lives an isolated life at her father's estate with a governess and some servants. She is the meal on which the vampire will feed more languourously, while the bemused males-- including a potential male romantic interest not present in the book-- try to fathom what's going on.

The specific points of the plot aren't that important; the main thrust of the story is that of the sympathetic characters' slow discovery of a viper in their midst. Gates naturally drops the book's subplot about Carmilla visiting the protagonist in childhood, but he does manage to convey that Emma's interest in her house-guest is essentially innocent. True, in place of the book's incident of Carmilla braiding Laura's hair, we see Carmilla and Emma doff their tops while the former teases the latter about her choice in dresses. But Emma, like book-Laura, is clueless about her guest's avaricious intentions. To up the sexual ante, Carmilla also dominates governess Mademoiselle Perrodot (Kate O'Mara), apparently making her into a useful slave but not a literal bloodsucker. 

This version of Carmilla does fang a couple of male victims to death, but those incidents don't really spur the sluggish story on to greater excitement. Peter Cushing naturally gets top billing, but his character adds nothing to the story, given that Gates' script builds up Hartog as the Van Helsing of the narrative. The dramatic beats are only adequate at best, and so the movie's main assets are also those of Smith, O'Mara, and Pitt. Pitt is good in the one role for which she became celebrated, but Carmilla didn't offer her, as an actress, any substance into which she could "sink her teeth," so to speak. LOVERS is certainly not, any more than the novel, any sort of lesbian "true romance" tale, and the film's main claim to fame is its place within early seventies' cinema, with its embrace of greater sexploitative story material.