Editorials
Exhumed & Exonerated: ‘Mute Witness’ (1995)
Every decade has its ups and downs when it comes to cinema, no matter the genre. Horror fans love to loft on high the output of the ‘30s & ‘40s, the ‘70s & ‘80s, and the more recent decades. More often than not, however, the 1990s are labeled as the worst decade for the genre. Not only that, but ‘90s horror tends to be written off as a whole, beyond a handful of undisputed classics. The purpose of Exhumed & Exonerated: The ‘90s Horror Project, is to refute those accusations by highlighting numerous gems from the decade. Stone cold classics will be tackled in this column from time to time, but its main purpose will be to seek out lesser-known and/or less-loved titles that I think deserve more attention and respect from fans. Let the mayhem begin!
MUTE WITNESS
Directed by Anthony Waller
Screenplay by Anthony Waller
Produced by Richard Claus, Marina Kapustina, and Anthony Waller
Starring Marina Zudina, Fay Ripley, Evan Richards, Oleg Yankovsky, Igor Volkov, Sergi Karlenkov, and Sir Alec Guinness.
Released on September 15, 1995
Billy Hughes (Marina Zudina) is a mute FX specialist working for a cheap slasher film production in Moscow, Russia. Her sister Karen (Fay Ripley) is an assistant to director Andy Clarke (Evan Richards), who also happens to be Karen’s boyfriend. They are all fish out of water, working overseas on a low budget production in a country where communication between them and the cast & crew is hard, given the language barrier.
After a shooting day ends, Karen and Andy go home to begin dinner, while Billy stays behind to find one last prop for the next day’s shoot. She intends to head on over to her sister’s place after she finishes up, but is accidentally locked in at the studio by the janitor. Billy attempts to call Karen, but due to the ruckus of Andy’s cooking, she has trouble getting ahold of anyone. She doesn’t seem too worried, however, as she patiently chills out in her makeshift workshop.
Upon hearing some commotion downstairs, Billy goes to see what’s up in the hopes that she might be able to get out of the building. She discovers that two members of the crew are clandestinely shooting what looks to be a porno on the film set. At first she smiles, shaking her head as she secretly watches for a bit out of sight. To her horror, however, it becomes clear that this isn’t any normal porn shoot. They’re making a snuff film and the girl subject is brutally murdered right in front of Billy’s eyes.
Naturally anyone caught in such a scenario is sure to accidentally make some noise as they attempt to sneak back out. This sets off an ever-escalating chain of events that spiral wildly out of control as the film goes on. Sex, murder, corruption, secrets, lies, twists, and a healthy dose of black comedy are all dished out frenetically as this Hitchcockian thriller races to its pulse-pounding climax!
Did I sell that last sentence well? I hope so, because what Waller created here was a fantastic thriller in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock and the best efforts of Brian De Palma. Mute Witness is a raucous and delightfully over-the-top roller coaster of murder, mayhem, and laughs from start to finish. Simply put, it’s pretty much a masterpiece. As a result, it’s a crying shame that it has never garnered the attention and admiration that it so rightfully deserves.
While Waller absolutely apes both Hitchcock and De Palma, he also manages to bring his own sense of style to the proceedings. He whips out almost every narrative trick in the book when it comes to a thriller of this type; utilizing classic murder-mystery tropes and wildly-stylized photography at every turn. From the slasher movie-aping opening to the left-field turns of the finale, Waller is absolutely in his element and firing on all cylinders every step of the way.
As much as I could go on about his mastery of the classic “Hitchcockian thriller”, it’s really the humor that makes this film stand out more than anything. Every scene is positively dripping with black comedy, causing the viewer to be busting a gut at all of the horrible and unlucky events constantly occurring to both Billy and especially anyone in her vicinity.
In many ways, Mute Witness would make for the perfect double-feature companion to De Palma’s Blow Out. That film similarly toys with movie magic and filmmaking, although it has a decidedly crueler tone and outcome than this one. In that way they infinitely complement one another, for you could have your soul crushed by Blow Out and then have it uplifted again by watching Mute Witness immediately after.
This film is probably most famous for containing the final on screen performance of Sir Alec Guinness. His scenes were actually shot in 1985 when Waller happened to come across the great actor while on a trip. Waller held onto the footage for almost a decade and eventually found a way to incorporate what he shot into this thriller. Guinness’ role amounts to an extended cameo, appearing in only two scenes, but he works well within the context of the film itself. I just wish his role wasn’t the film’s main claim to fame. Mute Witness should be lofted on high for its quality as a top-notch bloody thriller, with Guinness’ cameo simply being the cherry on top.
I wish I could go into further detail about how much I love all of the the twists and turns that the plot takes, as well as how they all incorporate a bit of old school movie magic in various different ways, but I don’t want to spoil it. Just know that if you have not yet seen it, it is way more than just a “style over substance” thriller and you owe it to yourself to track the film down. While it has yet to hit Blu-ray (fingers crossed that it does eventually), you can still easily find the DVD online for less than $10 (in many cases, half that).
As for those of you who have seen Mute Witness? Well, then perhaps it’s high time you popped it in again and reminded yourself about how it is still one of the greatest thrillers of the 1990s. The ‘90s were filled to the brim with thrillers, but not all that many so firmly had their toes dipped into the horror genre as this one. It’s a shame that Waller’s career was virtually killed in its tracks after his next effort, An American Werewolf in Paris (1996). I haven’t seen the few films he made after that, nor have I dared to revisit Paris. Perhaps it’s high time I did both?
Regardless of what he made after Mute Witness, director Anthony Waller deserves praise for so perfectly knocking this film out of the park. It is beautifully shot, expertly plotted, and wonderfully performed from start to finish. Seek it out this winner when you have the chance. I think there’s a good chance that you will have a lot of fun with it!
Up Next: Popcorn (1991)
Previously On…
Species | Mute Witness | Popcorn | Wishmaster | Alien 3 | Cast A Deadly Spell
Disturbing Behavior | The Sect | The Addams Family
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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