June 21, 1996

Today, as I try to catch up on my slightly lagging retrospective, I will take a look at two movies released on the same day a year and a week ago. One is a lavish Disney animated musical, the other a violent Arnold Schwarzenegger action vehicle, each of those art forms seemingly just a little past their peak. Both are about an unusual man trying to protect a woman from bad guys, and they were tied for the most expensive movie of 1996, having budgets of around $100 million.

Disney had experienced the wildly successful “new renaissance” streak of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, ALADDIN and THE LION KING, followed by POCAHONTAS, which was a moneymaker, but not as much as its predecessors, and not as well reviewed (except by me). Now comes THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, from BEAUTY AND THE BEAST directors Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise. Like POCAHONTAS it’s very Broadway influenced and addresses surprisingly heavy topics for a fuckin G-rated cartoon. It had a bigger budget and the animation is more showy, but in my opinion not nearly as appealing. With the villain in particular it kinda looks like they’re trying to do PRINCE OF EGYPT era Dreamworks but don’t quite know the style.

I’m speaking of the cruel, sexually repressed, genocidal Judge Claude Frollo (Tony Jay, TWINS), who is engaged in a bigoted crusade against the Romani people in Paris. In the opening scene he kills a fleeing immigrant holding a deformed baby. The archdeacon (David Ogden Stiers, BETTER OFF DEAD…, DOC HOLLYWOOD) witnesses the whole thing and guilts him into not dumping the baby in a well, instead agreeing to raise him as his own, by which he means name him Quasimodo and lock him in the bell tower of the cathedral.

As a twenty year old, Quasimodo (Tom Hulce, MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN) is strapping but hunchbacked and Toxic Avengery. He’s a great singer and the apparent inventor of parkour, but he stays hidden from society in the cathedral, his only friends a trio of wacky gargoyles played by Jason Alexander (THE BURNING), Charles Kimbrough (“Hospital doctor, uncredited,” THE SENTINEL) and Mary Wickes (SISTER ACT). They turn back to statues whenever anyone else is around, and I wish I could say it was left ambiguous whether he’s imagining them or not, but it seems pretty clear that it’s TOY STORY rules.

He gets sad watching all the fun below and not being a part of it, so the gargoyles convince him to go down during the annual Festival of Fools, defying Frollo’s “they’re all gonna laugh at you”s. He’s able to have some fun and be declared King of the Fools until mean people turn on him and he’s rescued by Romani rebel Esmeralda (Demi Moore, PARASITE), who gets arrested for standing up to Frollo. When she hides in the cathedral, sympathetic Captain Phoebus (Kevin Kline, SILVERADO), who is kind of the Sir Bowen of the movie but drawn like a more handsome Shaggy, says she claimed sanctuary, and then Quasimodo helps her sneak out. So they’re friends.

Esmeralda is drawn quite a bit like Moore, but dark-skinned. She’s a one-dimensional Disney princess without flaw – beautiful, angelically kind, spunky. Frollo wants to fuck her so bad he sings a song about how “this burning desire is turning me to sin!” but “It’s not my fault / I’m not to blame / it is the gypsy girl, the witch who sent this flame,” and he asks the Virgin Mary to “Destroy Esmeralda and let her taste the fires of hell / or else let her be mine and mine alone.” It’s a painfully accurate portrayal of misogyny and religious hypocrisy and also a really weird thing to put in a Disney musical.

Quasimodo also has it bad for Esmeralda, but seems to have healthier attitudes toward women. He’s heartbroken when he sees Phoebus and Esmeralda together, seeming like they’re about to get freaky. He hides behind a pole and it looks kinda inappropriate at first but it becomes clear that his hands are free and clear. Anyway the movie seems to agree that obviously she an only be kind to him, she can’t love him, and the hero will just have to stand there and smile for the not very memorable supporting character having the happily ever after ending.

I think the song that’s supposed to be the big showstopper like “Under the Sea” or “Be Our Guest” is one called “Topsy Turvy,” sung by Clopin (Paul Kandel, “Fireman,” FULL MOON HIGH), the jester-like narrator. It’s the scene where Quasimodo falls for Esmeralda and then gets mocked for his appearance, but it just feels like such an also-ran wannabe Disney hit, it barely registers for me.

The end credits are an R&B ballad called “Someday” by All-4-One. It still makes me laugh how normal it was for ‘90s movies to have just outrageously out of place songs on the end credits because they could get it played on radio, sell some singles, maybe make a video that works as a commercial. We just went with it. A bygone era.

I’m pretty sure this is only the second time I’ve seen HUNCHBACK. In 1996 I didn’t hate it – I thought it was impressively adult with the oh-my-god-my-boner song and everything, so it seemed notable in the gradual evolution of animated features, at least. But it was tonally misjudged. What kind of a lunatic thinks it makes sense to have such a serious movie but have it co-star wacky talking gargoyles? These were giant companies full of so many people having so many meetings where they came to an agreement that this was what they wanted to do, what they had to do to make a hit. It’s bizarre.

Revisiting it, unfortunately, it’s way worse than I remember. The animation is elaborate in its detail and dimensionality, but I don’t really like looking at it. The villain is impressively despicable but still not as entertaining to watch as a good, fun Disney villain. Esmeralda is pretty well animated but just such a one note character, a lifeless fantasy woman, and none of the supporting characters are even as memorable as her. Only Quasimodo makes much of an impression, with his climbing and swinging presaging the much better TARZAN movie that will be coming soon. So he’s a decent character, but do you really want to hear a deformed outcast singing like that? Well, I don’t. Admittedly, this is a very stage-musical type of movie, so if you’re into stage musicals you’ll probly appreciate it more than me. Unless it sucks on that level – I have no idea.

Even having a villain that speaks so specifically to our moment – a racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, eugenicist phony religious hypocrite tyrant – isn’t enough to give it spark. Still an admirable try, I guess, but a miss.

ERASER is a movie that I saw at the time, and reviewed in 2012 in the run up to EXPENDABLES 2. I never loved it but didn’t really want to skip an Arnold movie in this series, so here I am again. The good news is that I think it plays quite a bit better than I remembered. At the time it was “well, Arnold has made way better movies than this,” but now it’s “Arnold used to make movies!” I appreciate it more even if it’s on the lower tier of his work, or of ’90s action.

He plays U.S. Marshal John Kruger, but the credits call him Eraser, so obviously that’s what I call him. Eraser does erase people in the sense of killing them, but the name actually comes from his specialty of helping high value witnesses start their lives over under new identities. In the opening he finds mobster Johnny Casteleone (Robert Pastorelli,FERNGULLY: THE LAST RAINFOREST) about to be murdered for being a rat and he not only kills the attackers but blows up the house with other corpses wearing the clothes of Johnny and his lady inside. And he has to do it real quick, like in a couple minutes, before the cops get there, so he runs in with a cadaver over his shoulder like that log he had in COMMANDO.

Meanwhile, Lee Cullen (Vanessa Williams, HARLEY DAVIDSON AND THE MARLBORO MAN), a high ranking employee of the Cyrez corporation, is wearing a wire for the FBI and trying to retrieve evidence that her bosses are selling an experimental electromagnetic rail gun to terrorists. The long suspense sequence where she sneakily copies files from a high security lab is well done – I like how some of it is shot from the p.o.v. of her hidden brooch camera. It did in fact make me nervous for her, but it has the disadvantages of not really feeling like an Arnold movie, and more importantly not being able to compete with the more elaborate break-in in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (which was still #6 at the box office that week).

It’s nice that Eraser gets to have James Coburn (PAYBACK) as his boss, U.S. Marshal WITSEC Chief Arthur Beller, and James Caan (THE KILLER ELITE) as his mentor, U.S. Marshal Robert DeGuerin. I remembered that Caan unsurprisingly turns into the villain – couldn’t remember if Coburn was in on it or not, so I’ll leave that as a surprise for you. There are so many faces in this cast, though. Andy Romano, who played Admiral Bates in the UNDER SIEGE duology, plays Under Secretary of Defense Daniel Harper. Danny Nucci (right before TITANIC) and James Cromwell (right after BABE) both have parts where they seem important and then immediately die. Camryn Manheim has a bit part as a nurse – a year later she was starring in The Practice, which she’d get an Emmy and Golden Globe for. Oh yeah, and there’s a funny scene where two kids witness Eraser falling from the sky, and one of them is Camille Winbush, later the girl in GHOST DOG and on The Bernie Mac Show.

Pastorelli’s character comes back in the last act as the funny sidekick. I’m still not so into that thing where mobsters are lovable cartoon characters, we don’t really have to think seriously about what crimes they might’ve done and we just laugh at their tough guy talk and surprise sweetness. But I guess I’m old and corny enough that it’s becoming kinda cute. One part I had no memory of is that in his new identity he’s working at a gay bar. Man, I got worried. And in Pride Month! Although yes, there’s a bit of Eraser teasing him and we know what he’s getting at, it’s impressive how not-that-homophobic the scene ends up being. He seems completely comfortable working there and asks Eraser not to tell anyone he’s straight because he doesn’t want to disappoint them.

Director Chuck Russell (THE MASK) is no James Cameron, but the action here is enjoyable. (Stunt coordinator: Joel Kramer, Schwarzenegger’s double in COMMANDO, RAW DEAL, PREDATOR, THE RUNNING MAN, RED HEAT, TWINS and KINDERGARTEN COP and LAST ACTION HERO as well as stunt coordinator for TOTAL RECALL, T2 and TRUE LIES.) I hadn’t seen it in long enough time that I forgot about the best part – when he has to escape from a jet so he throws a chair into the engine to fuck them up and the one parachute falls out so he has to dive and catch it in the air. But then the plane comes after him!

I did remember the “fake looking CGI alligators,” which turn out to look pretty good, I wasn’t even sure how much was CG. It’s just that their instant viciousness and snapping jaws is pretty silly. But it’s fine. I was too hard on it at the time. I like the idea that he’s almost out of bullets so he shoots the glass in the alligator tank to continue the battle. You gotta do what you gotta do.

I think it’s universally agreed that the most memorable part of the movie is the rail guns. They’re huge, have a distinctive look and sound and way of firing, also the really cool gimmick of an x-ray scope and the ability to just shoot through walls and shit, no problem. They are an imaginative movie creation and then Eraser ups the ante by firing two of them and just sending dudes flying through walls. On another level, it’s a good villain plot because defense contractors creating horrific technology without caring about the inevitable consequences and government agents conspiring with them for profit seem like very true things. No belief needs suspending there.

It’s odd that Eraser bothers to avoid one-liners for a while, because when he lets a few slip (the famous “You’re luggage,” the final line) it makes me think oh yeah, no reason to pretend to be above these, these are what we want. It’s also kinda weird, but I like it, that we know nothing about Kruger outside of his job. He doesn’t have a family or a regular life or a past other than I helped this guy once or I trained under this guy. I think Russell and the writers recognized that this particular character wouldn’t be improved with humanizing. Might as well make him mythic.

I was kind of thinking I would’ve been okay with standard protocol and having the male and female leads fall in love. Those two seem like kind of a good couple. But then I looked it up and Schwarzenegger was almost my current age at the time while Williams was much younger, so maybe my instincts on that are not trustworthy. (Williams really seems ageless to me, though.)

The screenplay was a spec by Tony Puryear, an artist who later drew and co-created the Dark Horse comic Concrete Park, and designed a poster for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. According to his websight he was “the first African-American screenwriter to write a $100 million summer blockbuster.” But it had a murderer’s row of rewriters. The credited ones are Walon Green (THE WILD BUNCH, SORCERER) and Michael S. Chernuchin (Law & Order), uncredited reportedly include Russell’s boy Frank Darabont (THE FLY II), William Wisher Jr. (T2), Christine Roum (also Law & Order), motherfuckin John Milius (MAGNUM FORCE) and John Pogue (U.S. MARSHALS), whose material was supposedly not used but who directed the DTV sequel in 2022! Playing the long game.

Like HUNCHBACK, this has an adult contemporary R&B ballad end credits song, “Where Do We Go from Here,” sung by co-star Williams (who had previously done the end credits version of “Colors of the Wind” for Disney’s POCAHONTAS). (The answer to the question is “ERASER: REBORN, directed by John Pogue.”)

Russell is an unusual case. When I was young I thought of him as one of my guys, because his directorial debut A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS was honestly formative, pretty much what turned me into a horror fan for life. I’ve always liked his remake of THE BLOB, and THE MASK seemed interesting at the time (but I wouldn’t say I’m a fan now). I guess not loving ERASER must’ve broken the spell for me because I’ve never bothered to see BLESS THE CHILD, though I enjoyed his followup, THE SCORPION KING. Then he was cursed by The Mummy and disappeared for 14 years. So it seems positive that he’s had four new movies in the past decade, even if two of them are DTV and star John Travolta. (I’ve only seen one of those, I AM WRATH, which unfortunately I did not like much. I bought the Indian one JUNGLEE though, I will watch that soon.)

Most recently Russell wrote and directed WITCHBOARD (2024). It was produced by A-Nation, a company he co-founded that according to its websight is “the first tokenized film production company” and “will leverage Blockchain Technology to innovate the film industry, ushering in new and thoughtful ways to ensure creativity thrives for generations to come.” I truly have not the most remote clue what the fuck that could mean, and based on the websight I’m convinced that either

1) It doesn’t mean anything, it’s just buzzwordy gibberish to trick idiotic rich people into making terrible investments in tech bro magic bean bullshit

or of course

2) John Eraser helped set up some mobster with a new life as a websight designer who was hired to do this one and had no clue what the fuck these guys were talking about but didn’t want to rock the boat so he just made the text vague enough that maybe it would sound like it meant something to someone.

tie-ins: Obviously THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, being a Disney movie, had all forms of trinkets and toys and pajamas and shit. I don’t need to go into that. But ERASER had a novelization by Robert Tine (who had also done RED HEAT and LAST ACTION HERO among many others) and a video game sequel called ERASER: TURNABOUT released that October. Schwarzenegger is not involved, but you play as his character.