Jacob's Ladder

1990 horror movie

Rating: 13/20

Plot: A Vietnam War veteran starts seeing demons everywhere.

You know what Tim Robbins should have done in this movie to keep the demons from getting to him? He should have put together a bunch of booby traps with the help of Macaulay Culkin. This was Culkin's other movie from 1990. Home Alone, without any horrific Vietnam battle sequences with severed limbs and viscera or demon tentacles Trumping Robbins' girlfriend in a strobe-lit nightmare, was a bit more family friendly.

"Trumping," in case you're not aware, is a pussy grab.

There are lots of disturbing images in this, perhaps none more disturbing than the person nearly 50% of voters decided would make a good POTUS sexually assaulting women. The old lady in the subway car, straight from a Norwegian film, it seems; a creep shot of a web; a party edited to make it look like another war scene; the violent head convulsion motif; an ice bath with this dark angelic music. Even Santa Claus winds up being disturbing in this. The piece de resistance, however, is a lengthy scene where director Adrian Lyne unleashes a stream of weirdness during a gurney trip through a squalid hospital. There's a gristly surrealism as we follow Robbins through corridors littered with body parts, contorted figures climbing the walls. It's unpleasant stuff, and very nearly in the right way.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of silliness to all of this, a jarring pace, and jarring tones. And not in the way that jarring silliness could be effective in something like this. Once Robbins is sucked into a military conspiracy, a lot of that charming unease or playful brooding is gone. A mystery emerges, and a twist happens somewhere along the way though if you're paying any attention at all, you can probably see it way before Macaulay Culkin's parents realize he's gone. There's also a tacked-on, and probably a little tacky, history lesson at the end that made me roll my eyes.

Tim Robbins spends a lot of his screen time laughing in this one, and he's got a hair issue. I like how he was always willing to take roles in challenging movies though, and I like him here.

The only thing I remember about watching this movie in the 90's is that Robbins' character was reading the exact same paperback of a Camus book that I was currently reading. It messed with my mind a little bit, and I stayed away from situations where strobe lights could be involved.