"Jacob's Ladder"

                I notice that I have a tendency to spend a little more time than I would like poking fun at bad movies (where "bad" is defined as "I didn't like it").  Sometimes, though, it's just so easy:  you sit through something like Jason X and what else can you do but snark?

                But I wouldn't want it to be said that all I do is carp.  So with the intention of showing that I'm not just a cultural vandal (or, perhaps, not always a cultural vandal) permit me to talk about Jacob's Ladder, a vintage movie from 1990 that remains to this day one of my favorite horror movies.  Scary?  Check.  Emotionally exhausting?  Check.  Food for thought?  Check.

                I'm not sure how to go about producing a synopsis of the plot, so I won't.  Suffice it to say that the movie flits from one apparent reality to another, to the point that you aren't quite sure what's real and what isn't.  And neither does the protagonist, Jacob Singer, played admirably by Tim Robbins.  And though it isn't particularly horrific in the usual sense, it's still nightmarish as hell.  To this day, that frantic high-speed head-wobbling of people in the background gives me the willies, and the whole sequence where Robbins is wheeled through the derelict hospital on an old gurney and has his conversation with the surgeon is perhaps the most chilling vision of the fear of personal dissolution I've ever seen.

                To say nothing at all of the party scene, where Robbins begins to hallucinate wildly about Elizabeth Pena and that strange reptilian tail.  Or is he really hallucinating?  And somehow the notion that Tim Robbins receives the vital piece of wisdom he needs from Meister Eckhart by way of his chiropractor (!) seems both risible and entirely appropriate. 

                I know people who just loathe this movie on the grounds that it "doesn't make sense."  It's true, it doesn't have a linear plot, and most of the time the viewer isn't entirely sure just what the hell is going on.  At times, it isn't even clear what kind of movie it is.  It could be a horror movie, a conspiracy movie, a movie about war and PTSD; who can say?  But if you pay attention to what the chiropractor says to Jacob, the whole movie comes into focus, and reveals itself as a superbly written, superbly acted, and satisfyingly disturbing movie experience.

Five Skulls