The Survivor Review

• 3rd Jul 2011

New to DVD this summer is David Hemmings’ little known and rarely televised movie adaptation of one of British horror writer James Herbert’s perhaps slightly overshadowed earlier novels. I say “overshadowed” simply by dint of the idea that if you were to do a James Herbert all time top five books, The Survivor probably wouldn’t make it. I would say it would struggle to even make most Herbert fan’s top ten, but who knows, maybe I’m being unfair. It amazes me that over the years, there haven’t been more movie adaptations of Herbert’s work. It would seem that Stephen King need barely write something on a Post-it note and someone’s dying to make a movie of it, yet even James Herbert’s most celebrated and famous (nay infamous) work like The Rats, The Fog and The Dark aren’t represented in film form (and no don’t come back with Deadly Eyes being a film version of The Rats – it barely resembles the book except for the presence of… well, killer rats).

This (subjective admittedly) sparsity of Herbert penned film adaptations makes the existence of The Survivor as a movie all the more interesting. When I learned that it was in fact the very first (of less than half a dozen) Herbert novels to be adapted and filmed, I was quite shocked.

So what’s it all about? Well, in a nutshell the story centres around a major aeroplane crash in which a fully laden 747 ditches shortly after takeoff and explodes on the ground, killing all 400 odd passengers and flight crew. All that is except for Captain Keller, the plane’s pilot (a remarkably skinny looking Robert Powell), who walks away from the crash completely unharmed and suffering total amnesia about how the crash had occurred.
The story then focuses on the investigation as well as Keller’s journey to understand and remember. To that end he meets Hobbs (Jenny Agutter), a local resident and witness, who is having tormented visions about the crash and thinks she can help Keller, as well as herself be rid of the visions. She suggests a more leftfield, let’s say “spiritual” approach to figuring it all out, which Keller is initially reluctant to embrace.

While this is going on several less than honourable individuals associated with the crash begin dying in accidents somewhat familiar to anyone who’s seen a Final Destination movie (although a lot less graphic). The final revelation takes us fully into the realm of the supernatural rather than just mysterious and I won’t spoil it by describing it.

So before I get into the movie itself, let’s have a quick word on the cast. Joining the underfed and permed Powell and the ever lovely (although criminally over-clothed) Agutter we have veteran actor Joseph Cotten as the local priest. Cotten had an immense filmography beginning with Orson Wells’ Citizen Kane, and including all manner of notable classic film and TV appearances. His role here is small, perfunctory and not particularly interesting or ultimately even really necessary to the proceedings. It’s only really notable as his last performance before he sadly passed away. Weirdly, I remembered him most from an episode of The Rockford Files he was in, but only because I saw it fairly recently.

Slightly more effective is Peter Sumner as Tewson, an airline investigator and personal friend of Keller’s. He acts as a friendly liaison between Keller and the less than affable investigators who perhaps suspect him of foul play. Sumner is well known to any Star Wars fan as he had a small but memorable role as an imperial commander on the Death Star (if memory serves, he gets wookied).
Lastly, in terms of significance is Slater who heads up the crash investigation and really doesn’t seem to like Keller at all. Played by Ralph Cotterill, who you might know now from his more recent role in The Proposition with Guy Pearce. Slater is the villain of the piece right from the off, even though he’s a good guy ostensibly.

Having read the book a number of times in my youth, I knew the story quite well, and found the movie to be reasonably faithful at least to the basic premise. Although it does suffer in some fairly major ways. First and foremost the screenplay and script are very thin and badly drawn. None of the characters (even the leads) are able to really shine, and dialogue is sparse and most of the time awkward. Stylistically, the movie suffers a lot from feeling very 70s, with many sections containing no dialogue, instead lots of eerie sound FX not actually associated with anything physically onscreen, and lots of children trying to be all weird and scary. There is also some strangely abstract imagery here and there that to my sensibilities at least is misplaced and ineffective.

Speaking of eerie sound, music duties are handled by the late Brian May (no not the poodle perma-perm Queen guitarist), and is in my opinion completely forgettable, but serviceable enough for the movie I suppose. It’s no Mad Max, that’s for sure. The most memorable thing I noticed was a particular ‘Leitmotiv’ recurring every time we go to the crash site. It’s kind of an atonal scary vocal thing, and works quite well.

Back to the film, and it’s all a bit artsy without the conviction of true art film making. Agutter’s character for instance is seen right from the film’s start, yet doesn’t say anything until 45 or so minutes into it; there’s just lots of shots of her walking about making mysterious concerned glances and a bit of her best fart acting (and for all the Agutter fanboys out there, sorry no nudity).

For me, one of the most disappointing things about The Survivor is that it’s just not very scary. The movie is rated as a 15, but while Herbert’s original book, to be fair is not as visceral and gruesome as many of his others, particularly The Rats or The Fog, it’s certainly gruesome and disturbing enough to warrant a film adaptation to need the courage of its convictions. Make the damn thing an 18 certificate and let the claret splash where it may! As it stands there’s really only one scene that remains effective, and that’s the death scene of the wife/partner of the pap photographer who (seemingly unaware that her hubby has already had a one sided fight with an express train), is developing their macabre crash site prints in their home darkroom. All the prints of the burnt corpses that start appearing in front of her have their eyes wide open, piercingly glaring out from their blackened carbonised faces. She’s understandably upset and the visuals are quite effective here. She then gets chopped up by her own paper guillotine… I know, how does that happen then? We’ll never know ‘cos you don’t see it, but the scene remains the only one with any impact.

Speaking of visuals (and I don’t mean the unsettling number of awful male perms in evidence), the film has a real emotional and locational ambivalence about it. It’s obvious that it’s not set in England (the movie being shot in Australia) right from the outset, but I don’t recall location being firmly established either. However, not only are the two leads English, with clipped accents, but there are only the mildest Aussie twangs in evidence elsewhere. This results in a certain vagueness about where exactly we are, and in turn (coupled with certain other factors), a disconnected, slightly hyper-real atmosphere all round.

As already mentioned, the movie was shot in Australia. It was Australian-financed too, and although it was record breaking at the time, it feels very low budget now in places. This is most apparent in the plane crash at the top of the movie. Don’t get me wrong, the crash site location later on looks great, and the producers must have sectioned a substantial wodge of the budget making it as good as it is. Trouble is, shooting a 747 crash is an expensive thing to do, and save for a few slightly clunky shots of a decidedly small looking mock-up wing segment clipping a few trees and people running around in unconvincing panic, the rest of the shots of the plane exterior during the ‘crash’ is just footage of a regular old 747 making a regular old landing (possibly even stock). There’s very little else on offer to see and one is left kind of feeling short changed for such a big catastrophic event.

Anyway, this sparsity of production values is also apparent with the various mysterious deaths throughout the movie. The worst definitely being the guy who falls out of his wee fishing rowboat on a very unthreatening looking river. He swims to the bank, and then seems to be drawn back underwater and drowned by some unseen ‘mysterious’ (but not very mysterious) force. It’s pretty dreadful really (some of this can be attributed to the somewhat naff actor), but the whole event is completely lacking any drama, let alone actual horror. It’s stuff like that, coupled with a shortish run time and the somewhat limp-wristed and again quite inert and ‘drama-less’ final reel and the story’s big ‘revelation’ that serve to render the film a little toothless and ineffective overall.

My review copy had some nasty (white noise) audio glitches near the beginning which I hope don’t make it onto the retail DVDs. The disc is devoid of any special features as well.

The Survivor is not exactly a horror classic movie then and will be of interest mostly to James Herbert fans. The fact that this, along with Fluke and Haunted, are the only proper movie adaptations of Herbert’s work is nothing short of criminal. I do wish that somehow, someone will grow a pair, do the deal, and get The Rats trilogy made, or The Dark, or The Fog, or The Spear, or Sepulchre or Moon. How awesome would Domain be in film form? Come on, do it. Herbert is one of the most amazing horror writers there’s ever been and the world really deserves better than this.

Ben Pegley