Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992)

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Chevy Chase, Daryl Hannah, Sam Neill, Michael McKean

Have I Seen it Before: Oddly (and somewhat horrifyingly, as it turns out) enough, I’m reasonably certain that this is the only of Carpenter’s directorial efforts (so far… he said somewhat hopefully, while at the same time ignoring The Ward (2010)) that I saw during its original theatrical run.

Did I Like It: I mean, I don’t want to knock a guy like Carpenter while he’s down. But if he were here, I can’t imagine he’d defend the movie. Hell, it appears to be his only directorial effort that doesn’t have his name above the title. Everything here seems like it almost works, which is all the more frustrating. Carpenter making what amounts to a loose remake of <North by Northwest (1959)> is strong enough of a pitch to paper over most problems in most movies. Now that I type this, I think we should all collectively let him just do that. He can do it from his couch. We’re not that picky.

The special effects are a unique blend. We have the pointedly retro, as Chase pulls a pretty eerie echo of Claude Rains unwrapping of the bandages from The Invisible Man (1933), and what I’m pretty sure is some stop motion animation when Chase tries to prove to a camera in an empty room that he is in fact invisible by chewing some gum. It also manage to display some more cutting edge tricks by animating just what happens to an invisible body when it tries to smoke or eat.

And that’s where things start to fall apart. There are few performers that come to mind who are more throughly dominated by their ego than Chevy Chase. Hence, any attempt the film makes to reach for tragedy or pathos in the plight of Nick Halloway have to be immediately undone because in the 90s Chase couldn’t possibly end a film without him successfully seducing his leading lady. He’s not very believable or interesting in the role, and in a trend that was going to come up a lot more as the 90s trudged on for him, he isn’t very funny, either. What else is there? Somewhere in that spectrum had to be where he was aiming.

Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004)

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. Although for some reason this one is stuck in my memory less than Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003).

Did I Like It: And I wonder why that is. My immediate, instinctual answer is to say that as a college student when these were released, the first film somehow seeped into the consciousness of a certain kind of guy a bit more than this one.

Which is a shame, because (and forgive me if this next assertion dares to offend your delicate sensibilities) this is the better film. I might be inclined to think that my scant memory of the film made the surprises fresher and more pleasurable, but I think it’s more than that. The story here is tighter, the characters less broad, and the thrills are just as potent (which is only partially attributed to the reflexive cringing I experience after witnessing the repeated self-mangling of Uma Thurman’s hands.

Ultimately, I’m struggling to think of a film with a more potent (or even one to rival this film’s) feeling of catharsis in the aftermath of the climax. We feel the vindication of Kiddo (Thurman) so viscerally, we are very nearly relieved of Budd’s (Madsen) assertion at the top of the film—and I paraphrase—that she deserves to die just as much as the villains.

Here’s the conclusion I think I’m going to stick with. While the first film has plenty of thrills, and it could have suffered from being simply connective tissue in larger sagas like Back to the Future - Part II (1989)*, it is ultimately just a trailer for the far more satisfying conclusion contained herein.

* Which I still like, for the record, and about which I will not hear an unkind word.