Editorials
[Special Feature] ‘Dredd 3-D’ vs. ‘The Raid: Redemption’
When Lionsgate released their trailer for Dredd 3-D way back in July, we all basically thought the same thing: “Hey, this looks an awful lot like The Raid.”
It’s no wonder why. Just like The Raid, Dredd’s trailer sells a film in which an outmatched badass must take on an entire building of villains, battling level by level to the top floor where he must kill a drug kingpin who waits among cool, mini-boss henchmen.
You can cry foul all you want, but sometimes these things aren’t so simple. According to Wikipedia, Dredd started filming in Novemember 2010, while The Raid began its shoot four months later in March 2011. So there appear to be no shenanigans here to curse. We instead have something a bit more complicated. Two movies, completely independent of each other, both utilizing the completely awesome conceit of containing their action film within dangerous high-rises.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t have a little fun comparing the two, if only to highlight what an embarrassment of riches we action fans have been enjoying recently. Head inside for the death match!
THE BUILDING:
Dredd’s building is way taller than the relatively diminutive domicile featured in The Raid. Both buildings house innocent poor people as well as badasses, though Dredd’s appears to have a much higher poor innocent to badass ratio. As a result, The Raid’s tenement feels immensely more dangerous to walk around. That’s illustrated in each films’ respective number of action sequences. Dredd has a handful, while The Raid is pretty much all action from beginning to end.
Raid-1, Dredd-0
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THE SHUTDOWN:
In both films, our heroes cannot leave due to a building lockdown demanded from the main bad guy. In Dredd this basically amounts to a bunch of metal blast shields covering all exits. In The Raid, all exits are covered by snipers.
I personally found the snipers more threatening. Not only that, but there’s a part in Dredd where he actually gets out of the building and chooses to reenter, so the whole lockdown thing is clearly less important than in The Raid. For that reason alone, The Raid wins this one.
Raid-2, Dredd-0
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THE CITY:
Finally, Dredd gets a little love. While I enjoy The Raid, its action is so simple and compact that we learn very little about the surrounding area other than it’s dangerous and corrupt. Dredd, however, takes place in an overpopulated future city with all kinds of interesting stuff going on. Just the one moment in which we visually see how overwhelmed the Judges are with crime does wonders for delivering a fun and new cinematic setting. They don’t do as much with it as they could, but that’s the price paid for the simple plot set-up, which is worth it in my book.
Raid-2, Dredd-1
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ACTION:
This one seems more obvious than it actually is. While The Raid’s all out kung-fu assault gets everyone excited in all the right ways, Dredd’s slow-motion face shooting should not go overlooked. Even when Dredd goes hand to hand, we get that incredibly icky throat smash kill. Add Dredd’s super cool futuristic guns with their wide array of voice-activated ammunition, and you have a surprisingly strong showing from this masked underdog. Unfortunately, it’s just not enough to overcome The Raid’s truly amazing scenes of physical combat, snipers, and refrigerator bombs.
Raid-3, Dredd-1
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SIDEKICK:
When Dredd was just a mere trailer, its use of a female rookie sidekick raised a lot of red flags. Now that we’ve all seen it, however, Potential Judge Anderson ends up helping rather than hindering Dredd’s awesomeness. She’s a psychic who can totally hold her own both mentally and physically against The Wire’s Avon Barksdale. Furthermore, she and Dredd never have a boring, forced love story.
The Raid, in its infinite wisdom, had a pesky sidekick but shoves him out of the way as soon as possible, leaving Rama free to roam the halls like the lone wolf we wanted. Still, I’m kind of more impressed with Dredd’s successful use of a pesky sidekick rather than The Raid’s dismissal of the trope.
Raid-3, Dredd-2
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VILLAIN:
Dredd goes up against a narratively hyped and visually interesting Ma-Ma (played by Game of Thrones’ chilly Lena Headey). The Raid’s Rama has to deal with drug kingpin Tama Riyadi, a character we learn very little about. This one’s kind of a draw overall. Ma-Ma looks cooler, has a better backstory, and gets the better demise. But Tama seems far more raw and dangerous. Plus, he sounds really cool when he speaks.
Raid-3, Dredd-2
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VILLAIN KILLS OTHER VILLAINS SCENE:
So if that’s a draw, lets get more specific. Both films show us how bad their villains are by offering scenes in which they deal with internal conflicts (i.e. offing henchmen). In Dredd, Ma-Ma skins three guys alive and hits them with slow-mo just before dropping them 200 stories to their death. Pretty brutal.
The Raid’s Rama, on the other hand, just shoots his guys in the head. When he runs out of bullets on the last guy, he beats his head in with a hammer. Less showy, but equally effective.
Here’s the important difference: While Ma-Ma wins for sheer inventiveness, the slow-mo bit was not her idea. Furthermore, she does not dish out the punishment herself. Rama on the other hand, does his killing with his own hands. Therefore, he wins.
Raid-4, Dredd-2
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MINI-BOSS:
Ma-Ma has one traditional henchman, but Judge Dredd throws him over a balcony without much trouble. That would put her out of the contest, but she then calls up four dirty Judges to kill Dredd. They don’t succeed, but it’s a pretty cool move.
Unfortunately, The Raid has Mad Dog. No film is probably ever going to out-do Mad Dog as far as badass mini-bosses go. That little guy is just too insane.
Raid-5, Dredd-2
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Poor Dredd. In all honesty, it’s just not fair to put even the best action films up against The Raid. Dredd suffers but only by comparison. Action movies as pure and visceral as The Raid don’t come everyday. Dredd can reach some impressive cinematic highs and still be the inferior film. For my money, 98% of the film’s I have ever seen are inferior when it comes to The Raid.
At the end of the day, some concepts just make especially exciting films. Dredd and The Raid happen to share one of them. I wouldn’t mind a new version of the “Awesome badass fights an entire building of bad guys” sub genre once every year, regardless of how derivative of this or that film they may end up. I didn’t like The Hunger Games much, but I’m always ready for more films where kids have to hunt and kill each other. After all, how many movies do we have where a dude in a mask chops up teenagers? It’s a concept, and there are films enough to share.
If you haven’t seen Dredd yet, what are you waiting for? It’s an awesome, gory, action, science fiction film, the kind most people complain about missing lately. Karl Urban totally brings the hammer down on the role and the film manages to sidestep most of the stupid business that derails its ilk. Check it out and support R-rated sci-fi films while you still can.
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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