Review: "The Relic"

HYAMS, Peter, Dir., “The Relic”, Paramount Pictures/Cloud Nine Entertainment/Pacific Western Productions, 1996

Everyone has a movie that makes them feel good. When it’s cold outside and you just want to snuggle up on the couch with a hot chocolate and a favourite film, everyone has their ‘go-to’ DVD. For some it’s the BBC’s “Pride and Prejudice”; for others it’s “The Sound of Music”. For me it’s Peter Hyam’s film adaptation of “The Relic”.

(What? Not snuggly enough for you? Bite me.)

There are a lot of things that are plenty ludicrous about this film: the premise is whacky; the McGuffin shouldn’t work; there are some gaffes in the performances. But still, apart from these things, the rest of it just works. It’s not anything especially to do with the director, and it’s certainly not the special effects; it’s the art direction, the actors and, more than anything else, it’s the writing.

This film is like a Swiss watch: every beat, every line of dialogue, every piece of action, dovetails into every other part and the whole just works a treat. That doesn’t mean that you can coast while the action unfolds: oh no, this is a film during which you need to pay attention; but, at the end of the day, if you come away from it saying “What? I don’t get it”, then you’ve got no-one to blame but yourself.

Let’s start with the cast. This could have been just another monster flick, but right from the start, the cast lifts it to another level. The four headline actors are deluxe thespians, with a wide range of delivery and expertise. When this film came out, Tom Sizemore wasn’t anybody special; it wasn’t ‘til his run in “Heat” that people sat up and took notice. Here he has two parts of a role that shouldn’t work together – hard-nose policeman plus superstitious crank – and he makes it happen. Penelope Anne Miller has plenty of experience playing the heroine in opposition to unearthly forces (exemplified by her amazing turn in “The Shadow”) and I’m guessing that she took what she learnt here about playing opposite rampaging hulks and put it to good use in “Kindergarten Cop”. She plays Dr Margo Green, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum in Chicago, struggling to obtain more funding for her lab project and dreading the need to schmooze for the cash at an upcoming gala. Then we get an Oscar® winner: Linda Hunt. As the diminutive head of the Museum, she could have gone several ways with this role – whiney walkover or ball-breaking bitch being the two obvious options. Instead, she completely humanises the character bringing to it a believability and compassion that not only works, but provides a solid backbone for all the other characters to bounce off. Finally, there’s James Whitmore as the curmudgeonly head of the Anthropology Department. Without this guy, our two leads don’t get to word one: Millers’ Dr Green has no time for superstition and Sizemore’s Sergeant d’Agusta doesn’t take well to those who dismiss his ‘gut feelings’. Whitmore is the bridge between them and the source of much humour along the way.

Singling these four out doesn’t, by any stretch, diminish the support players. There are many actors in the wings here and each of them has but a handful of lines and some movement to work with; nevertheless, there’s not a single instance where the player doesn’t take these broad strokes and breathe life into the role. The trash-talking coroner; the unscrupulous lab researcher; the Museum’s head of security; the two kids playing truant in the exhibition; the guy who wrangles the domestid beetles – every single one makes their character work.

One of my favourites is the City Mayor who’s an officious jerk, not afraid to throw his weight around and abuse his power to get what he wants. If you look closely and jog some brain cells, you’ll recognise him from “Die Hard” as the guy in the aeroplane at the beginning who spots Bruce Willis’ gun and who tells him to “make fists with his feet” to alleviate tiredness. He starts off this role as an arrogant son of a bitch but by the end he’s done a complete 180 and we’re all cheering for him.

If anything, there’re too many characters here and the sheer excess causes some detriment. The two ‘coffee cops’, uniformed shmos who share the love of a good cup of joe, are really wasted: we don’t get enough time with them to really grasp what they’re all about.They should have been left unsketched and then left to die dramatically; the extra information about them that we have is too much with no point. (Sorry: I should have said “spoiler alert” there, I guess; but seriously, if you can’t see the targets painted on the backs of these guys then you can’t call yourself a horror movie buff!)

The art direction and sets in this movie are pretty fantastic. The Museum and the “Superstitions” exhibition which it is displaying during the film are amazingly detailed and it’s obvious that much love went into making these backdrops happen. Like most movies of this type (“Alien”; “Deep Blue Sea”; “The Thing”), the setting becomes the unofficial ‘other character’ in the piece, and it pays to listen to the information that the actors provide about it. If you miss that line right at the beginning about the coal tunnels down at the harbour, you’ll be floundering later on.

My favourite bad moment in this flick is when the monster slices a SpecOps guy in half just when we think he’s made it to safety: his buddy takes in what’s left of him and then, with a ham sandwich tucked firmly into each cheek, emotes to the back row. ‘Makes me chuckle every time. I guess there’s nothing wrong with Juilliard handing out wetwork credentials along with acting ones in these straitened times; it certainly pays to diversify. Oh, and, um, “spoiler alert”.

The premise of the film is that there’s a fungus with a virus-like ability to blend the genotypes of creatures which ingest it and then produce an admixture of phenotypes, a blended aberration known as a ‘chimera’. Such a beastie wriggles its way into the basement of the Museum of Natural History and starts decimating the population, driven by a need for hormones to keep it intact, hormones which, we discover, are found abundantly in the human hypothalamus. Much head ripping ensues. This is, of course, all bollocks: the actors mutter fervently about “reverse transcriptase” as much as they can to lend credence to the theory, but this kind of a genetic nightmare is just not possible. Nevertheless, it’s one of only two things that the script asks us to take on faith and, in the end, it’s no more unpalatable than being asked to believe that the moon turns people into wolves: if you fight too hard against it, you’re not going to have a good time.

The other thing that threatens suspension of disbelief is the program that Dr Margo Green is throwing together with the aid of her grant. It’s a computerised system which analyses processed DNA samples and identifies the component genetic sequences found in those scrapings. In terms of the movie working, such a McGuffin has to be here or the big reveal about the monster would never happen; however, since my sister has been working on such a device for the last ten years, I’m in a privileged position to know that such a gizmo was not possible back in 1996. Still, the producers and researchers have done their work here, and, although it’s anachronistic, it looks and sounds at least credible. Again, if you want to hang your head and lament Hollywood’s abuse of Science while the film rolls, go ahead: it’s your dime.

The special effects are a bit ordinary too, but Stan Winston does his best. There are a few places where the beastie looks a bit iffy but by that token we might as well dismiss every film that was made before the advent of CGI. I do have a reservation at the point where they forget that it’s a gecko’s relatively light weight plus its special toe-pads which allow it to walk on walls, not the toe-pads alone: a 600 kilogram behemoth won’t creep blithely up a smooth surface no matter what kind of shoes you give it. But it’s a small quibble.

There are some moments which make me roll my eyes a bit: the fact that Margo’s nemesis in the academic grant stakes is Asian, that the black janitor is killed after smoking pot, and the fact that the monster has to dribble all over Margo during the final confrontation – this is all just Hollywood playing to expectations. If Guillermo del Toro had directed this, those two kids who sneak into the Museum while on the wallaby wouldn’t have come back out in one piece either – audience expectations certainly didn’t stop him in “Mimic”! If anything, it’s the fact that this movie doesn’t break any rules or stereotypes which makes it the perfect haunted house romp. If it had been a teensy bit braver in what it was doing, it wouldn’t be passing in and out of production as it has over the last few years.

My boss alerted me to the fact that this DVD was available again a few weeks ago and I demanded a copy forthwith. Having bought the VHS tape back in 1997, and not upgraded to DVD during the first release in that format, I was feeling bereft of my comfort viewing. Now, I no longer have to make do with a lesser vehicle when I feel like cocooning in my doona and slurping my cocoa. I can unleash the Kothoga anytime I like!

Four tentacled horrors.