Despite the fact that 30 years separate both Heijningen’s prequel and Carpenter’s remake, that intervening 30 years was not enough time for Universal to figure out what made the first 2 films into the classics that they are.

Unfortunately, Heijningen’s film pales in comparison to its predecessors because it’s producers not only forgot the nature of their Monster, but also its social relevance.

Campbell’s novella, like Hawks’ and Carpenter’s horror movies were classic Cold War stories. Like the Body Snatchers, Vampires, Werewolves and Zombies that preceded it, The Thing walked and talked like it’s human prey. The threat was that these Shape-shifters — Zombies, Vampires, Body Snatchers and Werewolves –  were capable of achieving sufficient numbers to exterminate mankind and overturn human civilization.

The remarkable failure of Heijningen’s film and Eric Heisserer’s screenplay is that it fails to co-opt our period anxieties the way that it’s precedents did. Way, way back in 2007, ST:TNG’s Ron Moore had successfully relaunched the 70s relic, Battlestar Galactica, as a post 9-11 allegory. Universal was hopeful that Moore might somehow make their Cold War relevant again, and paid him a tidy sum for a first draft.

I have no idea how Moore’s original screenplay fell down, but at some point Heijningen and his producers determined that Moore’s screenplay required a rewrite. Thus, we somehow ended up with a prequel that features the notorious Norwegian camp of Carpenter’s remake, but also two visiting American scientists and an African-American pilot that were somehow ‘unmentioned’ in Carpenter’s original film. In the movie’s PR materials they make a big deal about Heisserer working in the tall shadow Carpenter’s greatness.

“It’s a really fascinating way to construct a story because we’re doing it by autopsy […] we’re having to reverse engineer it, so those details all matter to us ‘cause it all has to make sense.”

– Eric Heisserer on writing The Thing (2011)

Yeah, whatever. The film’s greatest disappointment is it’s failure to capture the anxiety of our era. Hawks’ and Carpenter’s films appeared as book ends to the Cold War. Hawks’ film appeared just before Russia charged ahead with their Sputnik program. Carptenter’s film appeared only after Afghanistan had sent the Russians home,  their tails between their legs, and 2 years before Ronald Reagan demanded that Mikhail Gorbachev “Tear down this Wall”.

Given our post-9-11 anxieties about shoe-bombers, sleeper-agents and other terrorists, it should not have been a big stretch to fashion a paranoid tale of xenophobia down in the No-Man’s Land of Antarctica. In the years following 9-11, numerous production companies have tried — and failed — to bring back the alien invasion movie. Most regrettably, there was the Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig vehicle, ‘The Invasion’ (2007) a poor man’s remake of ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’. Then there was the  Cruise-Spielberg ‘War of the Worlds’ (2005). In both of these films, the star-power overwhelmed the plot, such that the end-product was paranoia without introspection, without emotional anxiety — the Cruise and Kidman never question their own motives or the systemic failure of the world around them, making the resulting movie almost entirely flaccid.

2011′s Thing has no stars and should therefore have been willing to make Red Shirts of the entire cast. No such luck –  the Norwegians (played by Norwegian actors, no less), are picked off like extras, while Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Who?), Joel Edgerton (Who?) and Ulrich Thomsen (What?) are left to hold down the Norwegian Camp from its internal, xenomorphic invader. May their sacrifice not have been in vain.

This Thing it is not so much of a prequel as much as a beat-for-beat recycling of Carpenter’s film. The effects may be better, but the plot is not.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

Of course, it’s just the 3nd sequel to George Romero and John Russo’s Night of the Living Dead (1968)  but this film belongs to the dramedy fork of the franchise that Russo took when he and Romero went their separate ways.

Of course, RothLD 3 was written, directed and produced by ’80s low-budget schlockmeister and H.P. Lovecraft aficionado, Brian Yuzna. Unlike it’s predecessors, it abandons the full-on campy excesses of predecessors Dan O’Bannon (Alien, Lifeforce, Total Recall)  and Ken Wiederhorn to inject the tragic pathos of teenage romance into the mix, and somehow it works marvelously.
Melinda Clarke (CSI, Firefly, Nikita)plays the girlfriend who dies within the movie’s first 5 minutes. Devastated, her beau, Curt Reynolds (J. Trevor Edmond) sneaks onto the Top Secret military base where his father, Col. John Reynolds (Kent McCord) has been involved with the US Army’s experiments with the deadly, Zombie-activating Trioxin gas.

Given all of the OTT craziness, Yunza and Melinda Clarke really bring this one home. Between the script and the performance,  they create a devastating sympathy for Clarke’s tragic and slowly necrotizing Julie Walker. Clarke’s Walker really tries to go on with her life as though she never died, but the mortal coil fails her.

It’s Yunza’s triumph over a braindead horror-comedy formula that makes this film stand out. For a zombie flic, it’s not really about the brains or the eminent world-takeover; rather it’s about young people trying to separate themselves from their parent’s identity. For any movie aimed at the zombie teenage audiences of the early ’80s, this film is a major artistic achievement.

While this evacuate the Civil Rights-era messaging of the original Night of the Living Dead, Yuzna does a much better job of creating characters that we can actually care about. Beneath the surface of NothLD 3, there’s a simmering coming-of-age story as Curt tries to claim some autonomy from Col. John; it’s just too damn bad that death and zombies get in the way.

Rating: 3.75 out of 5 stars

‘Captain America: The First Avenger‘ (2011) • IMDb link

This one’s a bit contentious — Joe Johnston, who directed The Rocketeer way, way back in 1991 should have been a good choice to direct a period piece about Marvel’s Captain America set during WWII. But then, Johnston turned in the pointless and unnecessary Wolfman remake this past year, and then cast Chris Evans (Fantastic Four‘s Johnny Storm) as Steve Rogers, rather than  Mark Valley, (‘Human Target’) an actor born for the role.

Understandably, Marvel and Disney are reaching for a younger actor for the role, but I really dobt that those 18-49 women should be the marketing department’s target. Rather, the target audience ought to be 4 generations of American men aged 7 to 70 that Marvel ought to be aiming for. That, and the fact that 25 year-old Evans will have to go up against 46 year old Robert Downey, Jr., Chris Hemsworth and Samuel Jackson in ‘The Avengers‘ (2012) and make it somehow appear that they are peers.

‘Excalibur‘ (2012) • IMDb links 1, 2

Here’s one that I could not have anticipated, short of calling it sacrilige — an anticipated remake of John Boorman’s 1981 ‘Excalibur.’ I wouldn’t have bothered mentioning it here, but it turns out that therre may be TWO competing projects, BOTH set up at Warner Bros., one helmed by Bryan Singer (X-Men’) and the other from Guy Ritchie (‘Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’) written by comic book author Warren Ellis (‘Red’). One is said to center upon Guinnivere and Lancelot, the other a straight remake of the Boorman film.

I’m curious to see Ellis’ take on the legend, yet I can’t besmirch Singer. Release dates for the competing films have yet to be released. IF Warners does it right, they’ll separate the releases. I the meantime, who would have guessed that Arthur would be the new Superman?

‘The Ring 3D‘ (2012) • IMDb link

3D is a current fad, but horror lost something special when director Gore Verbinski abandoned the Ring franchise to make Pirates of the Carribbean for Disney. DreamWorks may have only had good intentions when they invited the original Japanese director, Hideo Nakata, to direct Ring 2, but the producers dropped the ball, by giving him a weak script. (FWIW, I’ve heard that Scott Frank’s uncredited contribution to ‘The Ring’ is what made it work and not the solo credit that the MPAA gave to Ehren Kruger.)

The franchise had legs, but rather than keep the memory of the first movie fresh in people’s heads by releasing a straight-to-video third film, they let it die. Starship Troopers got 3 sequels, The Grudge (2004) got 2 sequels and Jeepers Creepers (2001) got 2 sequels all within spans of 1-6 years for the immediate sequel and third films. It’s madness that DreamWorks and Paramount sat on this franchise for so long, especially given that the fans — both Americans and foreign J-Horror adherents were waiting — no, begging for the opportunity to be exploited.

In Asia, Ringu spun off into both film and television franchises in Japan and SE Asia. It is not as though there is a shortage of story ideas for an American franchise to poach or improve upon, it’s just that producers Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald stopped making product and abandoned the franchise.

We can’t expect to see another Ring film until 2012, muck less another featuring Naomi Watts or David Dorfman, so this one’s entirely up in the air.. The Ring was made in 2002 — that’s a decade ago, so it’s only possible to presumed that DreamWorks SKG has walked away from tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, especially if the inferior Grudge and Final Destination frnachises were able to make any money.

‘Runaways‘ (2012) • IMDb link

Runaways is a Whedonesuque take on superheroes that even Joss Whedon failed at. Runaways is the fruit of scribe extraordinaire Brian K. Vaughan, who has conquered comics (Marvel and DC) , television (‘Lost’) and film (‘Runaways’, ‘Y: The Last Man’ and ‘Ex-Machina’),  during the 13 years that he’s been working professionally.

Runaways, first published in 2003,is part of  the 3rd Generation of comics creators that began with Alan Moore publishing Watchmen back in 1987. The premise here is that there super-villains with children who are unaware that their parents are super-villains. But then one day the veil drops and the kids of time-traveling villains, evil robots, mad scientists and mafiosi determine that they want to get away from their mobbed-up parents and do the right thing. They are all also teenagers.

The good here is that BKV has written the screenplay and is likely to be credited as a producer on this film because he served as co-producer on “Lost.” Word has it that Peter Sollett (‘Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist’) has been tapped to direct for Marvel Studios, now a subsidiary of Disney. Marvel’s control over the project should see that the project doesn’t turn into another camped-out version of the original idea (cf. ‘Wanted’, ‘Red’, The Fantastic Four’, etc.)

‘I Am Legend 2′ (2011) • IMDb link

Fact of the matter is that this could be good in ways that the former film didn’t deliver. Will Smith was never appropriate for this role and they got the book almost entirely wrong by turning it into a Will Smith action vehicle.

The implication in the novel is that our Neville has passed through the looking-glass and become the monster and the vampire/zombies that rove the world are the status quo, now afraid of him. A prequel could do some interesting things in the realm of Charleton Heston’s Omega Man flashback sequences, which are very Andromeda Strain-like. A ‘prequel’ of Legend could, possibly redeem both Legend and the 2008 remake of Andromeda Strain, given that it would be the same type of bio-apocalyptic scenario. The writers of this thing just have to be able to sell Smith as a scientist, as Neville was before he became a rugged, gun-toting survivalist.

To summarize Parts, a group of young people are born, grow up and live in carefully controlled environment, wherein their every desire is indulged, yet their every behavior is monitored by the powers-that-be until such time they receive a call and it’s time for them to emigrate to the utopia of “America.”

Of course,  America is just a lie and all of these bright, young, ambitious kids are just the spare-parts clone-farm of an aging, wealthy, politically-connected elite that created the desert haven of Clonus as an organ-bank to extend their own lives. But the kids are aware of none of this — they are simply caught up in the celebration of their young lives, until the day that they are summoned to ‘America’.

Elements the Clonus plot turn up in John Byrne’s Next Men comic book (1991-1995) and Michael Bay’s ‘The Island‘ (2005). But only Bay’s $100 million dollar studio picture got a copyright infringement lawsuit against it. After a short spell of closed-door negotiation, Fiveson and his crew got the attention and compensation for the $251K movie they’d made 27 years before.

Finally, the Clonus premise  has inhabited the prose of British-Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro and his 1995 novel, ‘Never Let Me Go‘, later adapted for the screen by Alex Garland and directed by director Mark Romanek.

Anyone familiar with Ishiguro also knows that he is responsible for The Remains of the Day (1989) another novel  adapted into a splashy multi-award nominated film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. Because Remains seems to have been a metaphor for the lack of social mobility in post-War Japan and wartime Britain. it’s not a reach to suggest that the controlled environment of Let Me Go is a metamorphosis of Day‘s unrequited arrangement into a romantic triangle. She can’t have him, because he’s with someone else.

Thematically, there’s plenty of ‘Blade Runner’ (1982) in Never Let Me Go, but director Romanek has chosen to sublimate most of the hard sci-fi of Ishiguro’s alternate-reality. Like the Replicants, the ‘children’ of Never Let Me Go exist to serve their fully human masters, if only via organ donations. Like the Replicants, Ishiguro’s children may have a limited life-expectancy, but Gardner and Romanek play down the the science-fiction elements of IShiguro’s novel almost entirely.

Beautifully shot and convincingly performed, Never Let Me Go fails because writer Gardner and director Romanek are incapable of selling the romantic triangle. Garland created something similar in ‘The Beach‘ (2000), but that was Garland’s novel and not his screenplay. The necessary cross-fertilizing friendship just doesn’t develop in front of the camera.

The crisis that Kathy H. endures after Ruth and Tommy pair off is mostly one of isolation. In the Garland-Romanek adaptation of Never Let Me Go, I only saw that Kathy H. (Carey Mulligan) and Tommy (Andrew MacDonald) as friends while the relationship between Tommy and Ruth (Keira Knightley) just seemed to be almost entirely carnal.

All said and done, it was only Clonus‘ Richard that managed to make his way out of Plato’s Cave into the ‘real’ world, while Kathy H. was just left in the donation clinic pining for her lost friends.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

So begins Case 39, a horror-thriller vehicle for Renee Zellweger that’s sat on a shelf for 4 years. Wikipedia says, that the film was completed in “late 2006″ and rescheduled three more times before landing on American screens, this Friday, October 1.

Case 39 is not a bad movie, but it is a movie we’ve seen many times before (see Orphan (2009) and  Joshua (2007)). RZ plays the hard-working, well-maening social worker, Emily Jenkins who prevails upon her to add one more child protective case to her already-overburdened caseload. Vocation turns into affection and Jenkins adopts the child and brings her into her home, and then… things start to go wrong.

I won’t trouble you with any more details, as it is the interpretation of form that prevails is the real subject of interest here. Case 39 is a bad seed flick and moves fairly predictably, save for the contributions of actor Callum Keith Rennie during the first half hour or so. Though it’s billed as a Zellweger movie, it really belongs to Rennie and actress Jodelle Ferland, the troubled girl, Lily, whom Zellweger’s Jenkins rescues from a troubled home.

Fans of the recent Battlestar Galactica television show take note: Leoben is much more dynamic here. Ian McShane, Bradley Cooper, Cynthia Stevenson and Adrian Lester are wasted here. A better director would have figured out a better way of using their talents, once they were booked.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

The problem with both previous Predator flicks were that there was very little high-concept. In both preceding entries (Predator and Predator 2), the Predators and the humans were on Earth.

In the first film, the Predators interrupted Arnold Schwarzenegger’s hunt for something or other, and in the sequel, they appeared in a very hot L.A. summer, getting in the way of a police investigation of some sort. In each, it is strictly humans vs. Predators.

In this new Robert Rodriguez film, things have gone 3 paces further, as the protagonists have been kidnapped to an off-world hunting preserve and there is no ‘team’ of humans working against the Predators. Rather, the 7 humans *aren’t* working together. After a short spell they recognize that the 7 of them each represent the worst kind of murderous criminal on Earth and that they have each been selected as quarry for some yet-to-be-determined agent on this new, Earth-like planet.

Rodriguez wrote an original script for Predators back in 1994, long before the AvP franchise was even conceived. To Rodriguez’s credit,Predators (1995) was conceived as a direct sequel to Predator 2.

Most interestingly, this really isn’t a Predator movie until well into the 4th reel, when the Predators finally appear. Until then, the film simply plays as a particularly good episode of The Twilight Zone, where the  hunters  of The Most Dangerous Game size each other up, before trying to do one another in. Rodriguez does a nice job here by prepending a human story to all of the glitchy, gooey and messy effects, remembering that the story should drive the effects and not vice-versa.

The most interesting aspect of this film is the ‘hands-off’ approach that Fox studio chief Tom Rothman has taken with this franchise, after his direct involvement with the ‘AvP‘ franchise. Here, Rothman has handed Rodriguez the entire Predator franchise to shoot, not in some Hollywood backlot, but on Rodriguez’s own Troublemaker Studios, out in Austin, TX. The most interesting thing is that the film works as a late addition to entire concept of Auteur filmmaking.

And a great big hats off to Adrien Brody for playing against type and to Topher Grace for making another, great, unaticipated career move.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Operation Paperclip Nazis working in criminal sanitariums off the coast of Washington State? Mind control? A WWII veteran and widower with PTSD? Visuals by David Lynch.

It’s 1951 in this film and the most unfortunate thing about Shutter Island is that Scorcese and writers Stephen Knight and Laeta Kalogridis decided that it’s okay not to make sense. They decide to just let go. Film is a visual experience and flourishes are flourishes, so why the fuck not? If your local cinemat can affor to spend $750k on a new 3D projection kit, you can sit and watch Martin Scorcese orchestrate some crazy in 2D. On Shutter Island, the Eater Eggs and Red Herrings run thick, wild and free. So wild, that you may want to pause and consider throwing a few back, before deciding which ones you want to take home to eat.

Emily Mortimer is both Rachel Saldano whom Marshals DiCaprio and Ruffalo have been sent  to find, but also a Concentration Camp victim that DiCaprio liberated Dachau back in ’44. Saldano was committed 8 years ago, after she stabbed and drowned her 3 children, but disappeared out of her cell 3 nights ago. DiCaprio and Ruffalo wake up one morning to discover that Saldano has returned.

And then Scorcese lets it all fall away, revealing that DiCaprio is, in fact a Nº 6 and he’s been lured to the island for treatment,  and that he’s apparently murdered his dead wife. It’s a brain teaser.

In the last scenes there’s an uncomfortable acceptance of roles, where DiCaprio and Ruffalo briefly acknowlege the role-playing game they’ve been involved in, before DiCaprio joins the men with the pitforks and shovels (literally!) to take his long walk off a proverbial short pier. Scorcese spares us the pier, but leaves us wondering what kind of mannerist, noir, magic realism thing we’ve just given 137 minutes of our lives to. It’s beautiful and occaisionally sublime to behold, but I somehow suspect Dennis Lahane’s novel makes more sense in print.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

The misguided mash-up that resulted in Hellraiser — in Space… by Executive producers Paul W.S. Anderson and Jeremy Bolt have now given us Alien-meets-Serenity-meets-The Descent-meets-Defying Gravity-meets-2001:A Space Odyssey-meets-The Abyss-meets-Cube-meets-Sunshine, allowing the worst aspects of each film a moment for a pirouette of inexplicability.  3 of those 7 movies had serious story problems.

Like the 4 different posters in the movie’s advertising campaign, the PR can’t seem to determine whether the movie is science-fiction, horror or something else completely. While that combination might sound somehow enervating, the fact is that where those producers missed with their horror-fied remake of Andrej Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris’ is exactly where this duo have missed with ‘Pandorum’.Pandorum starts out well enough, with an intriguing premise — two astronauts on a long-distance, deep space exploration awake suddenly, after an unknown duration in hypersleep, the side-effect being that they have no memories of how they got where they were or what their mission is supposed to be. The problem is, that seems to be the motivation that the entire production team was using when they put this movie together.

There are no ideas in this movie, unless you’re the kind of science-fiction fan who delights in trainspotting the plagiarized source material. The movie is neither artful nor postmodern in it’s presentation. Like Event Horizon before it, Pandorum is just reheated leftovers, a serving of refried beans, some of them more than 20 years old.

The set design is pretty good, the fight choreography is difficult to follow and Dennis Quaid and Norman Reedus (Blade II, Mimic) are wasted here. Save your money and share a meal with someone you enjoy spending time with. Have a conversation.

I could go on at length, but there are only so many hours in a day and I have other business to attend to.

Rating: 0.5 out of 5 stars

Imagine a couple million dollars of filmmaking equipment, and empty studio and several tens of state-of-the-art technicians waiting on some Seattle lawyers, and you get the idea. though the film is a little more substantive than  that.

As someone who’s hasn’t played many video games in the past 20 years and been disappointed by just about every game-to-movie adaptation I’ve seen. ‘District 9′ exceeds all of the expectations I never had for ‘Halo’.

Plot-wise, ‘District’ is sort of novel because it starts with an unlikely premise — technologically advanced extraterrestrials end up marooned here on Earth, living in dire, 3rd world conditions. Strangely enough, these aliens don’t exert their prowess and take-over the planet. Somehow, they end up as an underclass here on Earth, whiling away their time in an aimless barrio in Johannesburg, as poor as any of the former bantustans living off of cat food

Why Joburg? To quote the characters on ABC’s current space-opera, Defying Gravity, “H2IK” — hell if I know. Any other storyteller would use the Joburg location to make a point — about South Africa’s apartheid history, it’s role as a former British colony or Nelson Mandela’s heroism. Unfortunately, that’s just where ‘District 9′ seems to fail. You shouldn’t pull an ornate prop or set-piece out of storage unless it’s going to serve your play in a constructive manner. Here, Johannesburg is just a city, like any other.

With all of the potential that D9‘s dystopia had to offer, it really doesn’t go anywhere. Had D9 been set in Asia somepalce, the film might have played as an metaphor for the money that the West pours into Asia year after year, only to see human rights violations  and hungry children persist.

My understanding is that director Blokamp hails from Joburg and had done a 6-minute science-fiction film, ‘Alive in Joburg‘ (film) back in 2005. ‘District 9′ is an expansion of the AiJ premise.Though the visuals are fairly impressive, I didn’t get the impression that D9 was ever intended to be a game-changer the way that ‘Close Encounters’ and ‘Star Wars’ were. 30 years ago.

Shot for only $30M, the film is a marvel of low-budget, high-end effects, but it’s still too expensive for the SyFy channel. I only wish they’d given the script another 2 weeks, to drive home an enduring story.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

While the franchise’s demons, the Cenobytes, appear within the film’s first 5 minutes, we only get a glimpse — they are by no means central to the story. Rather, Pinhead and the Cenobytes are simply the vehicles of hubris:The cenobytes both identify and punish those who are willing to overreach. Though the SciFi Channel insists that all genre movies reveal their creatures within the first 15 minutes, that formula — dictated by commercial requirements — is really irrelevant because ‘Hellraiser’ is an epic drama that circulates around Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence) and her evil stepmother, Julia (Clare Higgins).

Indeed, writer-director Clive Barker waits over an hour to give the audience a good look at the franchise’s signature demons, the Cenobytes, specifically Pinhead. The key antagonists in the first film are really Julia and the posthumous Uncle Frank. Julia wears little makeup, and Frank little skin.

What makes ‘Hellraiser’ an effective and entertaining movie is its emphasis on character and story, rather than makeup.

Uncle Frank rises from the dead at approximately the 20-minute mark, whereupon he marches around for the next 45 minutes fully flayed and in search of skin that can only be acquired vampirically, via the victims that Julia supplies him.

Looking back, ‘Hellraiser’ really was one of the precursors to the big genre franchises that the studios are wont to get ahold of these days — you know, the one-picture spec that turns into the 3 picture franchise-project after box-office receipts cross the $120M mark. Even Mr. Barker is probably surprised that his little million dollar picture spawned seven sequels and warranted a remake.

The remake — due in either 2009 or 2010, depending on where you look — one hopes that Seraphim Films and the Weinstein Company will work toward a 3 picture story-arc and take into into account the many continuity errors of the first two movies, like the Julia-spawning mattress that somehow survived the Dresden-like house fire at the conclusion of the first movie. Though substantial time is spent on a retcon-recap at the beginning of ‘Hellraiser:Hellbound’ (1988) that one would hope that the Weinsteins would choose a capable director and take the LoTR approach.

But the real value of ‘Hellraiser’ lays not so much in its latex prosthetics and stage-blood, but the slow burn of it’s domestic taboo themes: incest, infidelity and lust. It’s not selling her soul to the Devil that’s Julia’s error, it’s her transgressive relationship to brother-in-law Frank that drives her to participate in a Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka-like serial-killing spree, to restore skin to Uncle Frank’s undead sinews. Certainly, the soap operatic Bonnie and Clyde prepending of Hellraiser that makes the first movie so effective, especially when one considers similar movies — Bernard Rose’s ‘Candyman‘ (1992) and Paul W.S. Anderson’s ‘Event Horizon‘ (1997) — and their reasons for relative mediocrity.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

*Actually, the Cenobytes do make an appearance at the 3 minute mark, but it’s dark and ambiguous — the only real concluusions viewers can draw is that they wear leather and are comfortable around medical waste.