Sucked Dry

Less ideologically offensive than “Night Drive” but easily more vacuous and boring, director Christopher-Lee dos Santos’s “Eternity” is a vampire romance so tedious that you begin wishing for the fast paced antics of “The White Ribbon”. I am grateful for “Skoonheid” and “Roepman” and embarrassed for this film. In “Eternity, Andre Frauenstein stars as Billy (the name is a set-up for a terrible joke late in the film; it’s as forced as the character’s hair, which makes him look like a forlorn Goku in search of an Egoli Dragonball), a vampire who spends his evenings parkouring around Johannesburg with his buddies. After one night on the town (its rooftops, staircases etc), it is one of his friends who channels the great philosophers to make the seismic observation: “It is almost daybreak”. I think the rising sun gave him a clue, as it would Billy, but Billy stands there nodding solemnly.

Allow me to pause for a moment. Here are creatures that have obtained immortality and spend their time practising parkour. Something tells me they’re not doing it simply because they’ve already worked their way through the Western literary canon.

Life as a vampire seems uncomplicated enough, until a scientist (poor Ian Roberts, in another of his appearances as Ian Roberts-as-Character X) discovers a formula that could give vampires the ability to walk in direct sunlight without turning to ash. An emergency Vampire Board Meeting is called, where evil Borlak (David James) turns the tables on the more moderate current leader (Gys de Villiers) to become the alpha vamp. This scene exists only so that the film can claim to have a Vampire Board Meeting scene, which most contemporary vampire movies have. With the exception of the Big Bad Borlak, none of the other characters really make a functional appearance ever again. The dialogue throughout the film is ridiculously leaden and generic, but this scene is a particularly effective indicator of what’s to come.

One night, Billy meets Jenny (Rikki Brest) in a night club. May I venture that Brest (now now) was cast for her body, and not her acting abilities or strong verbal presence. If there’s not blood or parkour on the screen, there’s cleavage, and the camera spends minutes on Brest’s body in an early scene where she’s trying on different outfits for her night out. It’s so gratuitous it should be hilarious, but it’s more boring than anything else.

It is Jenny’s birthday, but her mother (Brumilda van Rensburg) does not seem to know about it. So Jesse and Billy celebrate by drinking and dancing. Another pause: Billy drinks blood. When asked what’s in his flask, he says something to the effect of “It’s some kind of Bloody Mary” and then follows up with a Stephanie Meyer-sized clunker: “It’s an acquired taste”. Anyhoo, so the Big Bad Borlak kidnaps Jenny to get his hands in the formula since Ian Roberts-as-Character X is her dad. (By this point - and I may be wrong because at some stage my mind wandered and I started thinking about Del Toro and Hogan’s “The Strain” and Cronin’s superior “The Passage”, which is a sweeping epic featuring vampires – the film reached the halfway mark, and nothing had really happened yet.) Billy and company set off to rescue Jenny and save… Save what? There’s no integration between the worlds of the vampires and the citizens of Johannesburg, so it’s cinematically unclear what precisely is at stake except for some individual fates.

I should mention that Hlomla Dandala co-stars as a policeman, Joe Kau. Dandala is better than this material, and all he does is say his lines, point his gun a lot of times, and appear on the scene when necessary. Model turned actress Christina Storm appears as Billy’s former lover, Lisa, who may be a bit jealous of her ex-boyfriend’s newly acquired mortal girlfriend. Storm, who also recently appeared in a horror of a different nature in “Ek Lief Jou”, is a dreadful actress, plain and simple. She brings only her body to a role that at least demands convincing grunting and groaning. Oh, the noises. These are some of the noisiest vampires I have ever encountered. They hiss and snarl and hiss and snarl and hiss and there I was again, thinking of “The Passage”. It really becomes comical. The blonde female vampire who lugs Jenny around is a particularly inspired hisser.

After the film reveals a big twist - a development even Oedipus would see coming, eyes or no eyes – the film predictably climaxes with a battle, followed by an ending so abrupt and impotent you cannot help but laugh again. “Eternity” is a bloody mess, and proves once more that a bad screenplay results in a bad movie, regardless of how many gunfights or parkour scenes or shots of heaving bosoms you put in.

A Long Time Ago in Hyboria

The remake of 1982’s “Conan the Barbarian”, one of the films of the early 1980s that helped catapult the name Schwarzenegger into fame, is a suitably brutal and bloody affair. I’m not so sure that it will do for new star Jason Momoa - who cuts a solid simmering Cimmerian and has a sense of self-awareness that Arnie didn’t have - as the film has bombed at the international box-office. There’s even been a public accountability statement from its script doctor, Sean Hood, where he addresses the film’s flaws. The new “Conan” poses no threat to existing fantasy franchises.

However, when hyperbole fades into obscurity and the dust settles on this expensive market miscalculation, then by Crom, the film is far from the “worst movie ever” disaster it’s come to be called. In fact, as has happened in the past, I had a good time watching a not-so-good movie. Somewhere between the CGI-blood, the loaded and hammy dialogue, absurd 3D violence and computerised matte-ish backgrounds, something clicked.

The film sets the tone with a striking opening scene. It takes us into the womb, showing us a peacefully floating fetus; seconds later, a blade plunges into the sack, and the screen goes red. This is not enough. The camera pulls out of the womb to reveal the agonised mother bleeding from a terrible wound. A battle rages around her. Her husband (Ron Perlman) arrives at her side. She wants to see her son once before she dies. Before you can say “WTF”, the father performs a battlefield caesarean and lays the child in his wife’s hands. “Name your son!” he commands. You know what follows.

A few scenes later, young boy Conan sees his village burned to the ground. Adult Conan (Momoa) sets off on his long gestating quest for vengeance. The man responsible for the earlier carnage is a dark lord called Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang), whose daughter Marique (Rose McGowan) assists him with special skills in obtaining the last missing piece that would complete a mask that serves to eliminate the boundaries between life and death, and makes its wearer extremely powerful. Conan’s mission to avenge his people’s deaths assumes a grander scale, as destroying Zym would mean peace for the whole of Hyboria. Lang looks good with facial scars and seems to take himself seriously, while McGowan (last seen sporting a machine gun leg in “Planet Terror”) has fun with long, deadly nails and a semi-bald head. She’s not really scary, but she looks kooky enough to make you think that there is a limit to her sanity. Not unpredictably, the relationship between her and Zym brims with incestuous energy, and it would’ve been interesting to see the film push the limits with this.

Director Marcus Nispel broke onto the scene with remakes: “Friday the 13th”, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”. He has a penchant for bloody messes. Yes, “mess” is ambiguous. Here he shows a good eye for action and violence, but the editing is over the top and choppy. Much of the action, as diverting as it is, is of the “if you’ve seen one…” variety, with the exception of a scene where Marique conjures warriors from the sand to face-off with Conan. This remake lacks the original’s sense of scope and the severity with which John Milius approached Robert Howard’s material, and attempts to compensate with some gratuitous nudity and absurd violence – there is a particularly notable nasal incident that inspires much cringing and flinching.

Conan of course has a love interest, Tamara (Rachel Nichols), with whom he shares a shockingly tame, safe sex scene. (Come now, this is not a spoiler. Surely no-one expects alpha male Conan to hold hands.) Their union happens in an abandoned cabin on the coast of jungle and nowhere. This is the type of film that drops an abandoned cabin into a place where no-one has any reason to habitate for the sole purpose of proving a place for the couple to get it on. What, they couldn’t find a rock pool? (Yes, I know that rocks can be sharp, pointy, dangerous. None of this is of concern to a barbarian.) This takes a special kind of narrative courage/stupidity.

I was never bored with “Conan the Barbarian”. It’s a wannabe blockbuster that’s ended up somewhere beyond B-movie status, and there is much geek and fanboy hatred towards the film from the kind of people who quote the original’s screenplay word-for-word and recreate cut scenes from the “Conan” game from a few years ago with Lego. “Conan” purists should treat this film with caution, but those open to its limited yet undeniable brand of charms can give it a shot. I heed against broadly recommending “Conan the Barbarian” to general audiences.

Note: I was reminded of that mid 1990s bomb “Cutthroat Island”, the pirate wannabe blockbuster flop that missed the pirate frenzy of the Naughties with a good decade. This too was far from terrible, yet nearly ruined careers. I will revisit both “Cutthroat” and “Conan” on DVD (in 2D!) when the time comes.