Editorials
Let’s Talk About That Bold, Bizarre Twist in ‘Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’
Obviously, this article contains Fallen Kingdom spoilers.
One of the new characters we meet in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is Benjamin Lockwood, played by veteran actor James Cromwell. As we quickly learn, Lockwood was the former business partner of the late John Hammond, and it was actually the two of them who together created what eventually became Jurassic Park. We also meet Maisie Lockwood (actress Isabella Sermon) in J.A. Bayona’s film, who is John Lockwood’s granddaughter. Well, she’s initially presented as Lockwood’s granddaughter, that is.
Early in the film, we’re told that Lockwood’s daughter had died in a car accident some years prior, leading him to essentially play the role of surrogate father to his daughter’s daughter, Maisie; the little girl lives with Lockwood at his estate, overseen by a live-in helper, Iris. But the film seems to be hinting at something strange about Maisie, which is eventually revealed to be a pretty massive twist for the franchise at large. While it initially seems that Maisie is merely a dead ringer for her late mother, we eventually find out that, well, she *is* her mother.
Maisie, the film tells us in a surprising twist, is actually Lockwood’s daughter. After her death, Lockwood used his daughter’s DNA to create a clone of her, which created a rift between Lockwood and Hammond that was never healed. In other words, the reason we never heard about Benjamin Lockwood in any of the previous films, Fallen Kingdom explains to us, is because Lockwood was written out of the Jurassic Park history books for going one step too far with the high-tech DNA wizardry he and Hammond perfected. While Hammond stopped at bringing dinosaurs back to life, Lockwood took it upon himself to bring his dead daughter back to life; human re-animation, for Hammond, was one area best not trifled with.
How does the reveal of Maisie’s not-quite-human origin play into the events of Fallen Kingdom? Well, it becomes clear in the final act that Maisie’s bizarre origin story exists in the film for the primary purpose of giving Maisie a direct link to the dinosaurs; after all, she, like them, was cooked up in a lab. This comes into play at the very end of the film, when Maisie makes the incredibly irresponsible (but totally understandable, both cause she’s a child and especially because she’s a fake-child) decision to set the surviving dinosaurs from Jurassic World free into, well, the world. Whereas Owen and Claire decide to let them die in containment rather than escape the Lockwood Mansion, Maisie can’t abide that. As she says in an admittedly corny final life before hitting the big red button, “They’re alive… like me.”
Maisie’s storyline aside, the “we cloned a human” reveal in Fallen Kingdom is a bold choice for a franchise that had never previously played around with human DNA. Sure, the revival of a long-gone, prehistoric species was perhaps always more impressive than bringing back one dead human being, but it’s nevertheless an addition that breaks new ground for the series. And even if the next film(s) doesn’t at all play around with that idea any further, what’s done can’t be undone: in the Jurassic Park/World universe, human beings can be cloned!
Could we someday down the line see the rebirth of John Hammond himself? Even more out there, could a new hybrid dinosaur be created that’s… part human?
The latter idea, now entirely possible in the world that these films inhabit, is actually one that the franchise has *almost* played around with in the past. As you’ve maybe heard over the years, a very early idea for the unmade Jurassic Park 4 included creatures that were half-human, half-dinosaur!
Around 2005, William Monahan and John Sayles had written a script for Jurassic Park 4 that boldly introduced the idea of human DNA and dinosaur DNA being combined for weaponization purposes, aspects of which eventually found their way into the Jurassic World films; after all, both films to date have played with the idea of weaponization and feature hybrid dinosaurs as villains, and Fallen Kingdom messes with human DNA experimentation for the first time. But the Monahan and Sayles concept took all of these things to new levels of absurdity.
As we’ve been told, that iteration of the project was to reportedly center on “a secret genetics lab that has been cross-breeding humans with dinosaurs. The result is an army of grotesque and intelligent humanoid dino freaks with problem-solving intelligence and the ability to fire automatic weapons.”
Early concept art – drawings and even sculptures – that was allegedly whipped up for this proposed project hit the net several years back, which you’ll find below. The legitimacy of the art has been brought into question more recently, with Industrial Light & Magic shooting down initial reports that it was their handiwork, but the art nevertheless paints a picture of what dinosaur/human hybrids might look like. And while they’d probably be cool as the featured creatures in their own movie, we’re thinking they’re just not right for Jurassic World.
We’ll likely never seen dino-humans in the Jurassic World franchise – according to Colin Trevorrow, we won’t even be seeing any more dinosaur hybrids in the next film – but along with Maisie Lockwood’s reveal in Fallen Kingdom comes a whole lot of intrigue. For better or worse, this dinosaur-inhabited world just got a whole lot more interesting.
You can’t help but wonder if Maisie is the *only* human clone out there…
Horror was thriving so well in the 1980s that movies like Pen Densham’s The Kiss (1988) would understandably get lost in the shuffle, only to then gain their fans later on in life. Even still, this one Canadian-American curio has had a more challenging time than others, as far as contemporary reevaluations go, which is very likely due to the movie’s limited availability—at least as of this write-up.
However, the scarceness of The Kiss, while a bit annoying, makes it like catnip for ‘80s horror completists everywhere. Hopefully, a lot of them will walk away satisfied after watching this hidden gem.
Even though The Kiss was intended as the first of several horror collaborations between Astral Pictures and TriStar, as well as the first feature produced by Densham, Richard B. Lewis and John Watson’s Trilogy Entertainment Group, it ended up being the only one produced from that former union. Once the movie was released, TriStar’s distribution jitters—they opted for a regional rollout—did the $6-million flick no favors. TriStar’s cold feet toward horror releases have been well noted, but The Kiss still did a tad better than Night of the Creeps (1986), another genre outing that flopped due to its regional opening.
Shot in Montreal, but set in Albany, New York, The Kiss—which was still called The Host just a few months before its October premiere—concerns an average middle-class family and their forthcoming situation. The uncanny problem in store for them was, in fact, set in motion some years earlier. As that hot and dusty flashback to the Belgian Congo shows, a familial curse was set upon the two Dunbar sisters well before Meredith Salenger’s teenage character was born.
Meredith Salenger, Nicholas Kilbertus and Mimi Kuzyk in The Kiss
The Kiss, which was based on a story by co-writer Stephen Volk (Ghostwatch) and penned by both Volk and Tom Ropelewski, has the outward appearance of The Stepfather (1987). This movie, though, is anything but a gender-flipped retread of that classic domestic disturber. For starters, The Kiss is far less grounded in reality—that much is clear from its unsettling opening scene. There, a trusting girl (Priscilla Mouzakiotis) is the victim of her own deceptive aunt (Céline Lomez); the movie’s titular act, and the story’s first shock, becomes the means of transferring an ancient evil from one host to another.
In the present day, Salenger’s role of Amy Halloran, a religious schoolgirl, is dealt a harsh blow in life once her mother, Hilary Halloran née Dunbar (Pamela Collyer), suddenly dies in a freak accident. But rather than a complete stranger sweeping the Halloran widower (Nicholas Kilbertus) off his feet some months later, Joanna Pacula’s character is that chosen temptress. Here, Pacula plays the grown-up version of the afflicted girl last seen in the movie’s opener. Since Amy’s mother is insistent about there being no reunion between estranged sisters, and she even contemplates buying a gun shortly before her tragic demise, it’s presumable that Aunt Felice poses a threat to her family.
The Kiss isn’t a movie ever too concerned about its own predictability. The audience is indeed often one step ahead of the story here, but also keep in mind how every one of those steps is loud. Take, for instance, the death of Amy’s mother; the Halloran matriarch goes out in garish, gruesome fashion, as a supernaturally commandeered truck sends Collyer’s character through a store window first, then leaves her one leg short. The directorial enthusiasm truly comes out in horrific moments such as these.
The Kiss is always sure to revel in its characters’ ills and misfortunes. So if the plot doesn’t impress, then its lurid parts should. Amy’s mother’s exit scene was proof of an eager, first-time horror director proving his worth. Then, bestie Heather (Sabrina Boudot) survives to tell the tale of a bizarre escalator mishap that, despite showing relatively less gore, spikes viewers’ empathy meter. The wilder bits of this movie, however, commence with that inevitable hookup between Felice and Amy’s bewitched father; their kitchen coitus is paralleled by Amy’s feverish classroom terror. The outcome there is a disquieting cross-cut of sex magic and a young woman’s menstrual onset plus hallucinations.
Sabrina Boudot in The Kiss
From foam appliances to bladders, that parade of special effects in The Kiss casts its own spell on the audience. Felice’s familiar, a visibly malevolent cat, was realized here with several models, some more articulate than others. Admittedly, the demon cat’s not as convincing as most of the effects here, but accepting that artifice, as opposed to fighting it, will make the whole experience way more enjoyable. As for the makeup used to manifest Felice’s inner villainy, it is more minimal and subtle than one might like; yet the work done to turn Pacula into an antithesis of herself is nonetheless compelling.
The otherworldly perils and dreadful goings-on wouldn’t work half as well as they do in The Kiss without the story’s contrast effect. Finding frights in picturesque, extremely ordinary settings was something that took off in the ‘80s, thanks to that sweeping shift to locales like the suburbs. And Amy’s home, a replica of a real Montreal suburban house, is the ideal battleground for any proper good-versus-evil story. It’s also prime real estate for this movie’s satanic panic-inspired horrors.
Because of their ostensibly similar plots, The Kiss has been compared to The Exorcist (1973). Except in Densham’s movie, the sinister, non-Christian entity targeting a teen girl lies within something less apparent and, perhaps, more devastating upon its exposure. To an outsider, Pacula’s Aunt Felice is too beautiful and unobjectionable to ever suspect of being a monster. More suspicious is how quickly she rips into the fabric of the Halloran home. Felice’s mere presence upsets the “texture of family life,” according to the director.
The demon cat in The Kiss
Taking out Amy’s mother and best friend, and distracting her father, would suggest The Kiss is playing by a different set of rules. It is initially leaving its adolescent target unsupported in a rather grim scenario. In contrast, though, this story offers up a surrogate parent who does her best to fill in the holes of Amy’s eroding home life. Mimi Kuzyk does good work as that family friend and doctor, Brenda, who guides the lost child without also steering her in any one direction; she is naturally skeptical of Amy’s accusations until it’s almost too late to do anything about them. So although The Kiss does an admirable job of undoing the main character’s support system, it never leaves her without a lifeline. This dark movie, in spite of everything that’s transpired, doesn’t deprive itself of light and hope.
The Kiss is a potent mélange of familiar ideas. If not for the director’s surprise flair for horror, though, the movie would have been less effective. What a shame that Pen Densham didn’t continue with the genre. As for Joanna Pacula, she is, too, owed credit as the wicked vixen opposite Meredith Salenger’s pitiable Amy; she never fails to be unsettling in her role. Pacula makes Aunt Felice a sexy yet intimidating character.
For horror that steadily doles out madness and menace, while also delivering a flashy and ghastly conclusion, The Kiss is certain to please. Yes, it’s cheesy all the way, but most favorably, everyone involved plays everything straight. That kind of commitment goes a long way with this movie.
The Kiss
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