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Film: Cronos
Release date: 6th February 2006
Certificate: 18
Running time: 88 mins
Director: Guillermo Del Toro
Starring: Federico Luppi, Ron Perlman, Claudio Brook, Margarita Isabel, Tamara Shanath
Genre: Comedy/Drama/Horror/Thriller
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD
Country: Mexico
As the first feature of Guillermo Del Toro, Cronos has gained notoriety due to the Mexican writer and director’s more successful later films, including Pan’s Labyrinth and Hollywood blockbusters such as Hellboy.
In 1536, alchemist Humberto Oganelli creates the Cronos device, a small golden casing containing an intricate mechanism and an immortal parasite. The device, designed to bestow eternal life on its owner, is merely the stuff of legend until it is discovered by antiques dealer, Jesus Gris, in the base of a wooden statue. Gris accidentally triggers the mechanism within the device, which clamps to his hand and draws blood.
Agreeing with his young granddaughter Aurora to keep the Cronos device a secret, Jesus develops a desperate thirst, and later allows the device to feed on his blood. Jesus becomes noticeably rejuvenated but has develops a craving for blood.
The existence of the device is also known by the dying Dieter de la Guardia, who assigns his nephew, Angel, the task of locating the statue and its priceless cargo. Angel fails to recover the Cronos device, and later appears to kill Jesus in an attempt to beat him into submission. Jesus lies unconscious during his own funeral, narrowly avoids being cremated and escapes, although his body is rotting. He finds his way to his granddaughter’s rooftop den, where he avoids sunlight by sleeping in her toy box.
Jesus and Aurora search de la Guardia’s quarters for the manuscript explaining how to safely use the Cronos device. They are confronted by de la Guardia and Angel and become involved in a battle to escape…
From unquenchable thirst to slow realisation that he hungers for raw meat and then blood, Jesus’ descent into vampirism is gradual, affecting and, in context, forgivable. As the device rejuvenates the old antiques dealer, Federico Luppi (in a role originally written for Max Von Sydow) gives a portrayal of a man with a new lease of life that is heart-warming, yet tinged with sadness, as Jesus acknowledges the high price of this reinvigoration. The sexual nature of Jesus’ sessions with the Cronos device adds an uncomfortable element far removed from other vampire stories’ rape metaphors – Jesus’ lust for blood rarely involves other people, as he seeks to assuage his bloodlust in a non-violent manner. Scenes showing Jesus distressed over whether to lick spilt blood from the floor of a bathroom are upsetting and wonderfully staged.
Cronos has terrific production standards for a first time feature. Interiors are well-worn and grimy, Jesus’ shop is filled with authentic-looking antiques, and de la Guardia’s quarters above an industrial complex are sinister and sterile. Moreover, Del Toro draws horrific scenes from innocuous events and objects: in particular, the deadly Cronos device itself, with its intricate, syringe-like mechanism, produces some effective chills.
The film is notable for being dual-language – Ron Perlman switches between Spanish and English, and the opening narration is also in English. Del Toro’s disregard for filmic conventions in spoken language pervades other parts of the film, which is filled with pleasingly specific quirks, such as Aurora’s rooftop den, the grandfather’s miniature tea party with his granddaughter, and the grimy crematorium with its nonchalant worker.
Compared to many vampire films, Cronos is concise – thematically, as well as in terms of setting. There is a neat circularity to its features: for example, it is Angel who searches for the archangel, and the image of beetles recur throughout – first crawling out of the statue’s face, then mirrored in the appearance and piercing ‘attack’ of the Cronos device.
While Luppi appears in almost every scene, the supporting cast is equally dependable. Ron Perlman’s Angel De la Guardia is callous and self-centred, providing many of the comic moments in the film, as well as being the most repellent character. His grunting horseplay with Aurora at the beginning of the film is both humorous and deeply sinister, as is his bizarre preoccupation with cosmetic surgery. Jesus’ wife Mercedes is played by Margarita Isabel with sad-eyed humanity, providing naïve warmth to balance the coldness of the film’s villains.
Cronos include many themes that Del Toro would explore in his later films The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, particularly the inclusion of a wise but innocent child. However, this film is notable (in Del Toro’s oeuvre - and horror cinema in general) for viewing events through the eyes of an elderly man, thus relegating the child to bystander.
Cronos doesn’t entirely break the mould of horror cinema, however. In particular, the exaggerated, slurping sounds of flowing blood are oddly conventional in a film that appears brave in many other respects, and Javier Álvarez’s score is effective but again adds little to the atmosphere.
It’s clear to see why Cronos secured Guillermo Del Toro’s reputation as an imaginative and resourceful director. It is easily one of the most effective horror chillers of the 1990s, and its casual disregard for cinematic conventions is welcome in a genre that too often veers close to pastiche. It’s visceral, affecting and unusual – and, in its small way, Cronos is a triumph of truly international cinema. TM
Film: Aguirre, Wrath Of God
Release date: 28th February 2000
Certificate: PG
Running time: 90 mins
Director: Werner Herzog
Starring: Klaus Kinski, Ruy Guerra, Helena Rojo, Del Negro, Peter Berling
Genre: Adventure/Biography/Drama/History
Studio: Stonevision
Format: DVD
Country: West Germany
Aguirre, Wrath Of God was chosen as one of Time magazine’s 100 Best Films Ever, describing it as “an examination of madness from the inside.” Aguirre’s influence spread to Hollywood, a clear inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Terence Malick’s The New World.
1560, Peru. An exhausted group of one thousand Spaniards and captured native Incas, led by the conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro (Alejandro Repulles), search for evidence of El Dorado, the legendary City of Gold.
After much struggle through the Amazonian rainforest, Pizarro orders a group of forty men to travel onwards downriver on rafts to search ahead. The small expedition is led by Don Pedro de Ursúa (Ruy Guerra), with Don Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) as second-in-command.
The group set off downriver on four rafts. One becomes caught in eddy currents, and, after being forced to return to rescue the soldiers the next day, the remaining explorers discover that the entire raft of soldiers have been murdered.
Aguirre takes the opportunity to lead a rebellion, which results in the leader, Ursúa, being shot and imprisoned. Aguirre manipulates the situation to elect Don Fernando de Guzman (Peter Berling) leader of the expedition, although Guzman is hopelessly inadequate. Aguirre, as the real leader behind Guzman, systematically kills any members of the expedition not pliable to his demands.
The expedition continues on a single, larger raft, although danger increases, as they encounter groups of Incas. Guzman is killed and Aguirre proclaims himself leader of the expedition, continuing to lead his gradually starving band of explorers downriver, towards increasing danger and madness…
Filmed entirely on location in the Amazon rainforest over the course of five weeks, Aguirre had a troubled shoot. While the director, Werner Herzog, felt that Aguirre should be portrayed as a quiet, menacing figure, Klaus Kinski insisted that the character should be a ranting madman. Kinski’s tantrums have become the stuff of legend; although the story of Herzog forcing his lead to act at gunpoint has been refuted by the director, Kinski did shoot off the top of one extra’s finger after a squabble. As in Fitzcarraldo, his later film portraying a madman’s struggle, Herzog blurred the line between film shoot and fiction. After a real-life flood destroyed the rafts built for the film, Herzog incorporated the rebuilding of the rafts into the film itself.
The film was initially produced with an English soundtrack (the common language of the multinational cast, and the language that Herzog felt would benefit the film commercially), but the commonly screened version features a higher-quality soundtrack rerecorded in German. Kinski demanded a huge amount of money for the rerecording session, so Herzog hired another actor to dub his German lines, resulting in oddly unsynchronised dialogue, which only adds to the unsettling atmosphere.
The film has a nightmarish documentary quality; droplets of water mark the camera lens, and scenes appear hurriedly framed (Herzog didn’t storyboard any scenes, preferring to react instinctively to the environment and performances). It’s often difficult to accept the bruised, terrified-looking participants as characters in a work of fiction or the rusting armour as props. In the initial scenes, showing the group struggling through the Amazonian undergrowth, the extras playing Peruvian guides seem perplexed and afraid of their armour-clad companions and their foolish expedition.
Kinski’s performance involves a rat-like posture that he would later employ to great effect in Herzog’s remake of Nosferatu. Added to this is a simian, scuttling walk - a man not entirely stable, even before his eventual descent into madness. Even at the start of the film, Aguirre is a pessimistic and toxic presence among the explorers, but, as the plot unfolds, he becomes more and more unpredictable, lurching between quiet meditation and frenzied outbursts.
The soundtrack is fixated around two themes: the panpipe refrain played by one of the captured Incas on the raft, and Popol Vuh’s strange Moog and choir arrangements, described by Roger Ebert as A “haunting, ecclesiastical, human and yet something else.” Both elements are calm but, used sparingly and accompanied by Herzog’s images, become deeply unsettling.
Much of Aguirre is what you might call ‘pure cinema’. Scenes showing the soldiers struggling to cope with their environment (one studying a captured Inca, one examining a butterfly landed on his finger, one staring forlornly downstream) are of equal or greater importance as scenes involving dialogue. Herzog, filming events in chronological order, documents a real journey and captures dazzling and unexpected moments along the way. However, Kinski’s final speech, in which he gazes down the camera lens as he expounds his vision of the new world, is one of modern cinema’s most arresting monologues.
Werner Herzog would continue to work profitably with Klaus Kinski, particularly in the thematically similar Fitzcarraldo.
If part of the joy of cinema is its ability to act as a window into another time and place, Aguirre succeeds magnificently, somehow authentic and honest, despite its fraught production. TM
