Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #145: The Hunger: "Sanctuary" and "Skin Deep"
#NotTrue #HewasinDreamOnaswell
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.
I have been covering David Bowie’s career in a sporadic, erratic AND, in the case of The Hunger film and television spin-off, erotic fashion. That’s because David Bowie’s film and television career was impressive, mysterious, perplexing but also random as hell.
Why did Bowie decide to lend his God-like presence to projects as justifiably obscure and slight as B.U.S.T.E.D, Just a Gigolo, August, The Linguini Incident, Bandslam and the second season of the Ridley and Tony Scott-produced pay cable horror anthology The Hunger?
Bowie’s appearances in movies and television shows often feel like favors to friends rather projects he felt passionately about. It’s damn near impossible to imagine the rock God reading the scripts for The Hunger’s second season and thinking, “This speaks to me as an artist and a man. I MUST be a part of this wonderful project.”
Instead, Bowie’s curious presence in the second season of The Hunger feels like an undeserved gift to Tony Scott and a movie he obviously feels an unmistakable affection for.
Bowie was not the host of The Hunger during its first season. That position was initially filled by Terence Stamp, who was similarly over-qualified while also lacking any connection to The Hunger as a film.
It’s also entirely possible that Bowie agreed to serve as the Rod Serling of the Hunger because he could probably bang out a season’s worth of intros and outros in a day or two. For Bowie’s benefit as well as their own, I hope they did not waste any of this great man’s time by asking for a second take. It doesn’t matter if he gets the lines wrong or starts crying unexpectedly half-way through an introduction. The Hunger TV series is so lucky to have Bowie classing the joint up that it should not have asked him to do any more work than was absolutely necessary.
But before Bowie inexplicably became the handsome face and sonorous voice of the Showtime sex shocker he starred in the premiere episode of the show’s second and final season as Julian Priest, an appropriately larger than life cross between Damien Hurst and Howard Hughes.
Once upon a time Priest was the enfant terrible of contemporary art. He ruled for decades as the provocative bad boy of art world transgression, creating a formidable body of work that lustily and provocatively explored themes of sex and death and violence and the university’s unrelenting cruelty and brutality.
That was a long time ago, however. As “Sanctuary” begins, Julian is hiding away from a world he no longer seems to understand. Fame has become a prison for him but he also somewhat confusingly seems to have chosen to live in an actual abandoned prison, complete with bars and decidedly spooky vibes.
Then one day Eddie Foden (Giovanni Ribisi) shows up at the front door of Julian’s home, bleeding and seeking sanctuary from police who are after him for shooting somebody. But the enigmatic young man wants more than that. He wants something that only Julian can give him for reasons that eventually become apparent.
“Sanctuary” takes place almost exclusively in Julian’s eerie haunted house of a home although there are some flashbacks to parties and artwork and sordid flings past. But because this is the work of director Tony Scott it is cursed rather than blessed with an overdriven sense of kinetic energy.
The episode shares with Scott’s worst, most headache-inducing and insufferable work the assaultive sense that the Top Gun director is trying to pummel the audience into being entertained, or at least into thinking that they’re being entertained.
Scott’s direction veers perpetually into self-parody. It’s the usual gauntlet of jump cuts, frenetic editing, random freeze-frames that double as time stamps and various other style-over-substance nonsense.
It’s as if The Hunger director (that would be the real, movie version of The Hunger, with David Bowie and everything, not this bootleg knock-off, also with David Bowie, puzzlingly enough) does not trust that audiences will be able to look at a single image for more than a second or two without growing hopelessly bored.
So the late filmmaker cuts everything to ribbons, employing a style that aspires to pounding visceral impact but instead just seems empty and overwhelming.
Julian lets the younger man come into his home and his world but he is suspicious of the bleeding and desperate fugitive for very good reasons. Eddie could not cut a more suspicious figure. Then again, that’s true of Julian as well.
Julian decides to make the violent young man the subject of his latest, grisliest and most extreme work of art yet until the big twist ending reveals that instead of killing Eddie he ended up killing himself, in an appropriately baroque and pretentious fashion.
Bowie’s anti-hero/villain is supposed to be the real deal, a genius who lives and dies for his art but like the show itself, he comes off as a glib pretender whose ideas lack the intellectual rigor and substance of Mr. Brainwash.
In death, Bowie makes the transition from main character to host when he reflects pretentiously, “I conceived the ultimate act. I pushed the boundaries of suicide, art, even death itself. I paid the price for immortality in more ways than one. Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.”
Not even Bowie can breathe life or meaning into those words, with their toxic cocktail of laziness, portentousness and cliche.
Bowie’s regal presence does not elevate this sleazy and sordid material; instead Bowie sinks to the level of this grubby, second-rate hogwash.
In the second episode of The Hunger, “Skin Deep”, Bowie is relegated to host duty.
For “Skin Deep” has something late-night cable audiences are liable to prize above the presence of one of the greatest artists of all time: hot naked lesbians having hot naked lesbian sex.
Bowie dryly intones of the fright fable we’re about to see, “Time passes. Things change but we’re still stuck inside our bodies, still ourselves, now and forever. You may wanna get out, but there is no way out. Even when we die, we die as ourselves, and for some people this is the true nightmare. They can’t stand themselves. They need to change. But you can’t change unless you’re lucky enough to know somebody who can change you. ”
We then meet our heroine Kat (Kim Feeney), an inexperienced lesbian who has only had sex with two people, something her best friend Lanie (Kate Vernon) deems “pathetic.” To get her out of a funk she takes her naive young friend to a dark and sexy club where she is mesmerized by Roxanne (Sarain Boylan), an erotic dancer with a malevolent aura.
Lainie tries to warn her friend that she’s not emotionally equipped to handle Roxanne’s grim universe of darkness, pain and extreme sex but she cannot resist. The sexual neophyte finds herself plunging deeper and deeper into a nightmare underworld in her feverish pursuit of the sexy dancer.
“Skin Deep” works a lot better as a nudity and lesbian sex scene delivery system than it does as a terror tale, fright fable or nasty nugget.
I’m writing about The Hunger as part of my David Bowie side-mission but also because one of my favorite forms of entertainment is the horror anthology. I had hoped that The Hunger would, at the very least, be in the same vein and spirit as my beloved Tales from the Crypt. The big difference is that Tales from the Crypt was a horror anthology with elements of soft-core pornography while The Hunger is soft-core pornography with elements of horror. For The Hunger, sex and nudity and transgressions aren’t just potent seasonings: they’re the whole empty meal.
I love David Bowie almost beyond words, so it pains me to concede that when it came to hosting horror anthologies, he’s got nothing on The Crypt-Keeper. If you are to compare Aladdin Sane to the Crypt-Keeper’s Have Yourself a Scary Little Christmas, however, Bowie emerges triumphant.
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