Say this for Cruel World, it certainly doesn’t try to
ingratiate itself with its audience. I think that’s supposed to be
a good thing. It is a dreadful mess of a movie, but that’s at least
as much because its makers set out to make it a mess as it is
because they didn’t know any better. In its ambition it resembles
Michael Haneke’s chilling Funny Games (1998), a movie
about kidnapping and murder that is also about movies about
kidnapping and murder — and the kinds of enjoyment we get from
them. But Kelsey T. Howard and Paul T. Murray, director and writer
of Cruel World, fall woefully short of Haneke’s standard
of movie-making.
Part of the problem is that they can’t make up their minds
whether they’re making a satire or a horror flick. The satire dulls
the edge of the horror and the horror kills the satire stone dead.
Wes Craven’s Scream films got around this problem by
satirizing the conventions of cinematic horror itself, but the
horror in Cruel World is incidental to the satire and so
seems merely gratuitous. Another part of the problem is that what
the movie satirizes is reality TV. That’s way too easy a target —
or way too hard. Reality TV always stands at the verge of
self-satire. The combination of exhibitionism and greed on the part
of the performers and voyeurism and the creepiest kind of
exploitation on the part of the producers means that the things
deserving of satirical treatment are already built in. How can you
tell the satire from the real thing?
Messrs. Howard and Murray may think they’ve got an answer to
that one in the fact that the losing contestants on their
reality show are murdered. But as murder plays no part in real
reality TV — that would be much too real for it — this just seems
bizarre and unnecessary. Edward Furlong plays Philip Markham, a
young man who has gone from reality contestant to reality producer.
When he is rejected by the beautiful Catherine Anderson (Jaime
Pressly) before ten million people on a Joe
Millionaire-like reality series, he makes up his mind to take
revenge not only on her and the man she chose instead but also on
his own group of reality contestants. As one of them says in
extremis, “What did I ever do to you?”
Hmm, that is rather the problem, isn’t it? I surmise
that the authors were trying, like Michael Haneke, to strip away
all vestiges of art and artifice and so to make the thing that in
the expression “reality TV” is an ironic joke into reality indeed,
or rather into an image of it. But in order to do that they have
had to create the biggest and most unreal cliche of all: a
caricature villain out to get revenge on reality show contestants
because he was rejected by a reality show. Talk about artifice! Mr.
Haneke’s villains are all the scarier for having no visible
motivation for the things they do, and they themselves joke about
this. Mr. Furlong’s Philip, by being given a stock and frankly
unbelievable motivation becomes a figure out of pantomime. Or soap
opera.
Nor does the artificiality stop there. He is assisted in all his
villainies by a younger and much larger brother named Claude
(Daniel Franzese) who appears to be developmentally challenged, as
they say. Like the Bond villain, Jaws, he has scary teeth, and he
carries out all Philip’s gruesome instructions with a child-like
loyalty. Or almost all. On two occasions he threatens revolt on the
grounds of his sexual interest in one of the contestants, Jenny
(Laura Ramsey).
“You said I could have Jenny!” says Claude, waving his gun
around carelessly.
You may think you know what’s going to happen next, or at least
eventually, but the movie plays with these expectations as a kind
of compensation, I guess, for having a couple of main characters so
caricatured that they call to mind Pinkie and the Brain. Mr.
Furlong hams it up even more by constantly drinking and smoking and
smiling and joking about his own wickedness. The young contestants,
all college students who have been attracted by the promise of a
million-dollar prize for the winner, are also much too sketchily
realized for us to care very much when they start to be killed
off.
Again, this must be deliberate. The film glories in the kids’
lack of individuality by having them introduce themselves as types
right at the start: the farm boy, the goofy guy, the shy girl, the
Dixie darlin’ and so forth. The idea must be to mimic the
conventions of reality TV, but even at this point these conventions
serve no apparent purpose. We have already understood that the
movie is going to be about Philip’s terrorizing and murdering
people, and he might just as well be doing it on a sitcom — or in
some Agatha Christie country house — as a reality show. Either of
those scenarios might have made this a better picture, but then
almost anything done differently might have made this a better
picture, if not a good one. I found it ugly, repellant and
pointless from beginning to end, but there will doubtless be some
more adventurous cinephiles than I who will see it as one of the
landmarks of post-modern experimentation.
