The Dementedly Dumb Delirium of BETWEEN WORLDS (2018)
A derangedly bonkers (and bad, but brilliant, but mostly bad) supernatural-horror-thriller-erotic-drama-comedy, starring Nicolas Cage as a shagaholic Deep South trucker.
From literally the very first second of 2018’s Between Worlds, upon sight of the basic-ass Times New Roman default font they chose for the main titles, the first thought that sprang to mind was:
“Did you even try?”
With the exception of the actors burdened with shouldering the weight of the abysmal script they’ve been saddled with, the answer for everybody else involved in this movie’s making is a resounding NO.
Writer/director Maria Pulera, in her second feature after her Rosanna Arquette-starring 2016 debut Falsely Accused, all-too-obviously tries her hand at aping the aesthetic vibes of David Lynch and Twin Peaks, but unfortunately does so in a way that’s entirely shallow, and lacking in any of Lynch’s vision or conviction.
She cobbles together a sizeable assemblage of many superficial details that relate to, homage, or outright copy Lynch’s oeuvre — i.e. a pulpy story involving woodsy small-town crime, mixed with supernatural darkness; tonal juggling of surreal quirky comedy with intense drama and horror; doppelgängers and bodily possession; a preponderance of cigarettes and coffee; a jazzy bluegrass rockabilly background soundtrack, coupled with ominous synths and drones; casting Nicolas Cage, who starred in Lynch’s Wild At Heart; inexplicably managing to hire Angelo freakin’ Badalamenti to compose a main theme for the film (perhaps as a favour to Cage, seeing as they’d worked together previously on both Wild At Heart, and Neil LaBute’s notorious remake of The Wicker Man? I dunno, I’m conjecturing here); throwing in a prominent needle drop from Marilyn Manson, who — whenever he wasn’t busy being a vile putrid pustule of irredeemable human garbage — collaborated with Lynch a few times in the past; hell, even the film’s title itself harkens back to that famous Twin Peaks poem:
“Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see / One chants out between two worlds: ‘Fire… walk with me.’”
Unfortunately for Pulera, all of that Lynch worship is for nought, as her screenplay and direction are simply both fundamentally terrible, her Lynchian fangirling in service of what ultimately amounts to a glorified softcore porn (and a bad one at that), with added helpings of schlocky camp and unintended comedy, all wrapped up in a bow of nigh-on incompetent production on nearly every technical level.
The cinematography and colour grading are as basic and ugly as the main titles’ font, the colour palette all muddy browns and dreary greys, and the camera frequently positioned in either Doug Walker levels of amateurish Dutch angles, or awkward too-close-ups which make it so that in one moment, a boot entering the frame by stomping into a puddle winds up splashing water on the lens, or in another moment, Nic Cage damn near jabs his fingers right into the lens’s eye.
The score sounds like lazy boilerplate stock music, or a slapdash combination of a bunch of GarageBand loops an intern hurriedly made on their phone during a lunch break. Or rather, to be more specific, whichever parts of the score weren’t Badalamenti’s creation, as I think(?) you can quite clearly tell when it’s his work, considering he appeared to have essentially just mildly tweaked the melodies of pre-existing Twin Peaks tracks like ‘Freshly Squeezed’, and ‘Dark Mood Woods’. It’s hard to know for sure, though, as there’s currently no official soundtrack album, nor any soundtrack information out there period, which can definitively delineate Badalamenti’s themes from whatever music main composer Jason Solowsky made for the rest of the score.
The editing is a patently sackable offence, a baffling series of jagged jump cuts, unmissable continuity errors that were nonetheless somehow missed (primarily during the various sex scenes, where items of clothing are visibly removed, un-removed, and re-removed between cuts), a bafflingly weird ending scene that’s so incongruously out of place that you wouldn’t be surprised if it was accidentally dropped into the wrong part of the editor’s timeline, but nobody cared to fix it, and a recurring editorial fixation with characters’ dialogue from later in the movie being repurposed as voiceover for unrelated scenes that happen much earlier on, which smacks less of being an interesting way to make the story feel cyclical and Doctor-Manhattan-y in its perception of time, but instead more as though they realised the film was an incomprehensible dirge that made less than zero sense, so they used this “voiceover” as a means to patch and stitch this mess together into something vaguely coherent.
(It didn’t work, mind you. Not in the slightest. If this ever made sense in Pulera’s head as she wrote it, I’d be frankly astonished.)
Pulera’s screenplay is a tour-de-force of exemplifying the palpable need for at least seven or ten more drafts to polish this turd up, because this has all the same kind of circuitously unnecessary repetition of words and dialogue as was found in M. Night Shyamalan’s godawful adaptation of The Last Airbender, not to mention some of the whackiest, stupidest, thuddingly wonky dialogue that no human person could or would ever believably utter.
e.g. This strange exchange between Cage and Potente:
POTENTE: “So, do you want a beer?”
CAGE: “Does the Tin Man have a sheet-metal cock?”
Meanwhile, Pulera’s lacklustre direction leaves a lot to be desired, inasmuch as she’s very bad at maintaining tone, bad at blocking scenes, and bad at directing her actors, who while they may all steadfastly 100% commit to their performances in spite of what they’ve been given to work with, they never feel like they’re a part of the same world, but rather that they’re each acting in completely different movies from one another.
Franka Potente’s earnestly naturalistic acting makes her character come across as comically oblivious and hopelessly naive, a side effect of her acting style butting heads against the meme-baiting overt theatricality of Nic Cage’s unhinged, outrageously maniacal… well… Nic Cage-iness… and in turn, both of their acting styles butt up against Penelope Mitchell’s self-aware, slyly camp soap-opera seductressing, purring every line like it’s a cliffhanger to a scene that’s about to swiftly fade to black for the next commercial break.
Yet even though all of these ingredients objectively should not work, because the foundations concocted by Pulera are shoddily crafted and broken to begin with… somehow, the trio of Cage, Potente, and Mitchell collectively conjure up a bizarrely compelling frisson of so-bad-it’s-good energy within their batshit crazy dynamic together, working wonders — whether intentionally or otherwise — to keep your eyes glued to this magnificent trainwreck.
One can only speculate, but something about these three’s interplay with one another makes me think that they all knew the film they were making was absolute garbage, so they just decided to band together, throw all caution to the wind, and have their own fun with the material.
And now for some stray observations of various things that are said or done in Between Worlds that I couldn’t be bothered to structure into a unifying review format, because as entertainingly horrendous as this movie may be, it is not worth my time to put in that kind of effort for it.
So:
• To his credit, when Cage’s character of Joe (no relation to his character Joe from David Gordon Green’s film, Joe) says “I smell like three days on the road”, he certainly looks like he sounds, sounds like he smells, smells like he sounds, he’s lost and he’s found, and he’s hungry like the woooolf — wait, what…?
• Cage acting like he’s high off his tits on weed is exactly as magical a scene as you could dare to dream.
• Whilst shagging Franka Potente’s character, Cage loudly asks her to imitate Linda Blair in The Exorcist screaming “FUCK ME!”
Why? Who knows?!
Also, Penelope Mitchell’s character, Billie, is watching them jealously from across the room (because again, this is a bad porno).
Also also: FUN FACT — did you know Penelope Mitchell is a cousin of fellow Australian actress Radha Mitchell, who [*Troy McClure voice*] you may remember from such films as Phone Booth, Man On Fire, and Silent Hill?
Well, now you do! So that’s all good then.
• Oh right, yeah, so the film’s big plot twist-that-isn’t-a-twist is that Billie, Potente’s teenage daughter (ever-so-conveniently clarified to be 18 years old, so the sex-based craziness that’s soon to ensue isn’t too icky!), is revealed to be possessed by the spirit of Cage’s character’s unhinged dead wife, Mary (played by Lydia Hearst), who’s been using her new nubile — new-bile? — young vessel to seduce her erstwhile husband Cage, via covert handjobs, leaving doors open while lazing around in lingerie, and the like. When Mary/Billie finally spills the beans to Cage that she’s his wife (which happens some time after the handjob), he’s all sceptical and saying that if she doesn’t stop talking, he’ll spank some sense into her (because again, this is a bad porno), to which she replies:
“You never hit me. Even when I hit you.”
Ohhhhhh.
So she’s Amber Heard, then!
[DISCLAIMER: The author wishes to stress that his jokes and opinions are his own personal views, and ergo do not represent the views of Medium or its affiliates. The author is just a snarky git.]
• One gloriously absurd moment occurs during a preposterous montage set to the strains of aforementioned abusive asshole Marilyn Manson’s edgelord cover of ‘I Put A Spell On You’, featuring Mitchell perched on a motorcycle, spraying down a fully-clothed, hysterically exuberant Cage with a garden hose, in slow-motion, seconds after Cage had sprayed her with the selfsame hose, cackling the words “GOLDEN SHOWER!”
• And now, the biggest notoriously outrageous moment in Between Worlds that if you’ve ever heard anything about it before this point, it is likely because of this:
The jaw-dropping, unbelievable, and thoroughly amazing sequence where Cage and Mitchell’s characters are having what I at first thought was that ludicrous kind of 365 Days-type loudly exaggerated softcore shag-a-thon, the enthusiastic copulators crosscutting/teleporting between multiple locations seemingly simultaneously as they get their freaks on, but which upon a second closer inspection I realised was actually meant to be a depiction of Cage reliving a past memory of shagging his wife when she was alive, whilst he’s presently shagging the barely-legal teenage girl possessed by his wife’s sex-crazed spirit. The reason for this incomprehensibility is not only because of the previously highlighted woeful editing, but also due to Mitchell and Hearst both being styled blonde in order to heavily resemble one another, which makes sense plot-wise, but as a result does make it sometimes difficult to tell the difference between them if they’re both shown in the same scene.
Anyway, during this epic shag-fest, Cage repeatedly calls Mary/Billie “a little tart”, and then in both timelines, Mitchell/Hearst breathily asks him to read to her — mid-coitus! — from a book called Memories, which we soon see (and hear, via Cage’s recitations) is a collection of erotic(?) poetry, containing such choice phrases as “golden cock”, and “hap-penis”.
But what’s most noteworthy about this book — apart from it having no blurb on the back, because the art department couldn’t be bothered that day — is that its front cover can clearly be seen to declare the name of its author to be none other…
…than NICOLAS CAGE.
And for what it’s worth, with such wild scenes as these, Cage knew exactly what he was doing. Quoth the Cage:
“I like watching people squirm — so those scenes that we have in the movie that were cringe and squirm inspiring is what made me laugh, so I would approach it from that angle.”
• Oh, and lest I forget, there comes the final minutes of the movie, where Cage repeatedly cries out the name of his dead daughter (“SARAAAAAAH!”) in the midst of an alcohol-fuelled mental breakdown caused by a revelation about his wife’s evilness, leaving him crawling on the floor and playing with a Jack-In-The-Box, in a bit of grief-acting that was genuinely emotionally powerful in another 2018 Nic Cage flick, Panos Cosmatos’ dementedly brilliant Mandy, but in this sloppy silly accidental comedy is rendered just plain embarrassing, self-parodying, and painfully funny.
Then Cage douses himself in gasoline from an unestablished jerry can that just magically appeared out of nowhere, lights a cigarette, sets himself on fire (becoming engulfed with Gothika-style bad CGI flames), then immediately stubs the cigarette out on his chest after one puff, all the while not emitting a single exclamation to express any iota of physical pain.
Because… sure.
In conclusion:
PAUL, JASON, AND JUNE FROM HOW DID THIS GET MADE? NEED TO MAKE AN EPISODE ABOUT THIS MOVIE AS SOON AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE, BECAUSE OH MY GOD, THEY COULD CONSERVATIVELY TALK ABOUT BETWEEN WORLDS FOR UPWARDS OF SEVEN AND A HALF YEARS…
Originally published at https://vocal.media.
