That shall be His undoing...

Highlander



I cannot really say what makes this movie sooo special to me. I place it in a holy shrine up with Back To The Future, The Terminator and several other eighties movies that hold a place in my heart for some kooky teenagery can't quite put my finger on it reason. I was fifteen when I first saw Highlander, an impressionable age indeed. Clearly, it was genre films that enticed me the most. But it was a genre that still had a purpose, an adultness to them that slowly shallowed into turgid crap towards the end of the decade, as the fast cutting, dimwitted blockbusters lurked in the shadows ready to pounce and have been the bread and butter of Hollywood ever since. But I digress.

Highlander was the brainchild of former firefighter and first time screenwriter Gregory Widen, who unfortunately never really lived up to the promise of his first screenplay (he went to write Backdraft and the upcoming Solitaire), but I assume he's been able to live off the rights to the various anciliary Highlander projects. His script is refreshingly non-Hollywood in its mixture of fantasy, action, humour and horror blended together with jarring style and is possibly one of the reasons it failed in the US but thrived in international markets (the butchering of the film also has something to do with it, but more on that later). The other important ingredient is Aussie director, Russell Mulcahy, making his US debut here, who had previously shot music videos for Duran Duran and Rod Stewart and the giant-pig-in-the-Australian-outback flick, Razorback. Here, Mulcahy toned down his overblown dynamic visuals enough to allow the story to be king and allow the actors to give better-than-average performances for this kind of low budget fare.

In fact, the mid eighties were a gold mine for quality low budget genre films such as Highlander, The Terminator, The Hidden and RoboCop. Strange as it may seem, all these films were made for less around $5-10 million, maybe not low low budget for the eighties, but when you consider that Return Of The Jedi cost something in the order of $30m in 1983, not exactly expensive either. Unfortunately the bigger the big budget movies got, the bigger their openings were, and the little movies were slowly pushed out. More and more titles were made for direct to video and the quality suffered dramatically. Only The Terminator had a sequel that made significant money, but that was because they spent significant money on it.

But back to Highlander. As with Widen, Mulcahy had trouble living up to the promise of all those flashy music videos, Razorback and Highlander. A sequel and several other genre movies and tv movies followed, but it was only really the drama, Swimming Upstream (2003) that showed through the performances of the cast that he could do more than action movies. Mulcahy extracted some reasonable performances from his Highlander cast. Christophe Lambert is probably at his most likeable in an English language film here, Connery is solid (of course) and the female leads (Roxanne Hart, Beatie Edney and Sheila Gish) all give sweet performances. But the clear, standout performance here comes from the Kurgan himself, Clancy Brown. His is a brash, loud, over-confident take on a role that had become tired and worn over the years. The reason he succeeded is that he never lets the dark humour over take the menace that is the Kurgan. One minute is screaming like a teenage banshee, the next he has taken your head clean off. He's a motherfucker not to be messed with who also likes an ale. Clancy Brown has had a striking career but like his characters he's always lurked in the shadows, and just when you think he's about to pounce, he receeds back and is swallowed by the darkness: Rawhide in Buckaroo Banzai, the monster in The Bride, Jamie Lee Curtis' superior in Blue Steel, the superintendent in Shawshank Redemption, Zim in Starship Troopers, Dr Weaver's love interest in ER and Brother Justin in Carnivale. His characters are always scarred, flawed fascinating characters that clearly are an extension of the actor. You know how you tell a working actor these days? If they do voice work. Clancy is all over the shop, from Batman, to Spongebob Squarepants to Justice League to Spawn to Spider-Man to Jimmy Neutron to Star Wars. Whew!
Watching Highlander again recently I was struck but well it had held up. It hasn't really dated. Despite my shrine placement of this movie, I acknowledge it's flaws. It was compromised by further edits by the American distributor which would have made the movie all but incomprehensible. The English actors playing Americans can sometimes be a little jarring. The special effects budget was clearly limited and while the gorey stuff is overall quite good, the animation is a little poor and the clearly visible wires during the finale has always been a talking point amongst my friends and I. What saves this movie is imaginative story, flashy direction, witty one-liners, low-key performances and Clancy Brown. Oh yes, Clancy Brown.