Resurrection: undoing golgotha
As all good serial killer movies must, Resurrection opens on the scene of the crime, which fosters the necessary illusion that we're starting at the same place the detective is: with a mangled body from which we / he have to reconstruct the crime, which will in turn identify the criminal. That's the basic formula, tried and true till it's black and blue. Typically, too, the figure of the 'detective' gets split in two, simply because the role entails so much and the buddy-cop dynamic is so easy; it supplies the banter that gets us through the slow parts, all the forensic slogging the modern audience demands. Resurrection starts out this way--with bad attitude homicide detective John Prudhomme (a hardboiled Cajun Christopher Lambert) paired up with the amicable Andy (Leland Orser)--but soon enough that's abandoned, and it's Prudhomme fighting the serial killer alone.
And this is no run of the mill serial killer, concerned solely with body count. No, this one has a mission. That first body Resurrection opens on, after all, has the right arm missing, from which Prudhomme is instantly able to mumble in his best Morgan Freeman that there'll be more. There is, and it soon becomes evident that this serial killer is collecting body parts, doing the Frankenhooker thing. But to what end? Director Russell Mulcahy isn't worried about keeping that secret long: the serial killer is justifying the title ("Resurrection")--putting Jesus back together, which will, through some Silence of the Lambs stuff, supposedly teach society some se7en-ish lesson. Which is to say writer Brad Mirman is trying to build something himself here, only he's using other movies. But does it dance, though, right?
Surprisingly, yes, and even better than some of the pretenders (Kiss the Girls, Copycat, etc). And this is largely because A) there's some real tension about who the killer's going to turn out to be--though you will likely guess it; and B) the killer has a mask which should be standard-issue for any would-be serial killer, a Michael Myers affair, but one that shows even less emotion somehow, or, reduces the human visage to twin eyeholes and a slit mouth, which is to say it effectively erases the serial killer's humanity. Which is disturbing.
To make up for this lack of humanity--i.e., to further show how our hero is the perfect inverse of the serial killer--Resurrection makes the obligatory nod towards establishing Detective Prudhomme as very human. And 'human' here is defined as having marital problems which stem from the death of a child, who dies in a manner so graphic you really want to look away. Think Gabe in Jacob's Ladder, Gage in Pet Semetery, the kid in Shortcuts. It's bad, and on-screen. Of course, too, structurally speaking, the serial killer and Prudhomme are also engaged in similar activities: just as the serial killer is piecing something together, so is Prudhomme--his life. Meaning the title applies to him as well . . .
The serial killer, however, is much more meticulous about it, elaborately staging his crime scenes, manipulating Prudhomme and Co. like puppets, which suggests that, as narrative reversal goes, he'll be defeated by some swift counter-manipulation. Regrettably enough, that isn't the case. Instead of beating the serial killer at his own game, Prudhomme instead has to beat him with fighting prowess, (this is the Highlander crowd, after all) his lightning quick reflexes, all that. Which would have been a not-bad place to wrap things up; a proper denouement doesn't have to address every thread, after all. In Resurrection, though, it does. And it takes a while, requires not one fade-out but two, which results in something like overkill. And the bad thing is, David Cronenberg was presumably on-set (as Prudhomme's priest), to warn them away from this mistake. But so be it. Even though it evidently wasn't fit enough to open in American theatres, Resurrection is still one of the stronger serial killer movies, if only because it dares to have as its set piece one of the more sacrilegious images around.
(c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones, http://www.cinemuck.com
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