• Directed by Don Michael Paul
• Written by Samuel Bozzo
• Starring
  • Lance Henriksen
  • Brian Wimmer
  • Claudia Christian
  • Adam Taylor Gordon
  • Sean Young
• Produced by Michael J. Dubelko and Stephen J. Cannell

Part the First: Spoiler-Free

What with the glut of apocalyptic movies still cluttering videostore shelves since Y2K, it’s probably going to be tough for The Garden to get noticed, with a cover blurb that talks about Armageddon and the fulfillment of a “final prophecy.” Which is too bad, because even though it’s not a terribly original story, it’s effectively told. Granted, it’s fairly bombastic, but any movie which revolves around weighty matters of theology pretty much has to be.

Our protagonist is Sam (Adam Taylor Gordon), a twelve-year-old boy with a full slate of problems: He’s not dealing too well with his parents’ divorce, and is being overcome by deep, possessive dreams, full of the foundational symbolisms of Western civilization: Trees, serpents, and apples. So intrusive are these dreams and their waking echoes that he’s gotten into the bad habit of cutting himself to focus and stay in control. As we meet him, he’s just ending a week of hospitalized therapy, where his new control technique of drawing out his dream visions in a notebook is finally supplanting his self-mutilation, although he’s still covered in scars and scabs in various stages of healing. Dr. Cairns (Claudia Christian) thinks he’s making good progress, but has worries for the immediate future: After spending the summer with his father David (Brian Wimmer), Sam will be heading back to his mother’s house, and Dr. Cairns worries that the binary transition from one parent to another will undo his progress. Missing here is any discussion of the fact that repeated dreams about Adam-and-Eve scenarios by a twelve-year-old, complete with forbidden fruit and big long snakes, is SO OBVIOUSLY a metaphor for a pubescent’s growing sexual self-awareness and anxieties, but I guess once you bring that up, the movie can’t help but turn out to be a completely different creature. (“The first horror film from acclaimed director David Hamilton…”)

“Hey, sport, when we’re done here, wanna go get involved with cosmic forces in an archetypal power-play?”

Dad, meanwhile, is battling his own demons that led to the divorce, his infidelity and his barely-restrained alcoholism. Thus the fragile father-and-son duo makes their last roadtrip of the summer, from the hospital to the family ranch, stopping along the way to buy some extra workhorses. (And I must surrender my Junior Theologian Merit Badge for not immediately picking up on the fact that the horses are white, red, black, and pale.)

Their trip home is marred by a road accident — the barely-seen image of a spectral figure, with facial apertures stitched closed, sends them off the road. And Sam wakes to find himself in the old country home of Mr. Zachary (Lance Henriksen), a solitary but personable old farmer who has, by the time Sam regains consciousness, offered Dad a job and board for a few weeks to help fix up the farm.

Lance Henriksen is of course captivating simply by virtue of being Lance Henriksen, and brings a wonderful hardcored ambiguity to the character of Mr. Zachary, who has no entertainment media in his house except an old Victrola and a collection of old Spider-Man comic books. He prefers to spend his time working, playing the piano, or playing chess, a skill which Sam shares. (Is there any game more fraught with meaning — nay, Meaning — in the movies than chess?) Despite Sam’s misgivings, the two stay on at the Zachary place, where Sam’s dreams take the new setting to heart and blur further the boundary between waking and dreaming.

Howcome no one ever uses backgammon or tiddlywinks as a big ol’ metaphor?

Of course, horror movies in which dreams and wakefulness converge are nothing new, even outside of specifically dream-related franchises like the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. But having already established Sam’s rich and sometimes overwhelming dream life does add a welcome layer of plausibility to the standard panoply of cinematic night terrors; in other words, Sam doesn’t get to be automatically right about The Big Bad Evil simply because he has spooky dreams.

And if dreams were all he had to deal with, Sam would probably survive just fine until it was time to leave. But he can see his Dad’s control over his various lusts slipping, and Mr. Zachary never seems to say anything to Sam or interact with him in any way without some very definite subtext. And just to make sure that the symbolism fodder level is good and high, the school class in which Sam enrolls for the first few weeks of the term, taught by Miss Chapman (Sean Young), includes a literature class which is dealing with the first and last books of the Bible concurrently — you know, Genesis and Revelation, the two most symbolically-charged books of the Bible.

And then Sam sees Mr. Zachary kill Dr. Cairns, who’s shown up to check on him, and stitch her mouth shut. But by morning there’s no evidence to support it, and he — and the viewers — have to wonder: How much of it did he see, and how much of it was embellishment by his fertile subconscious?

Is YOUR cosmetic surgeon board-licensed?

What I appreciate most in this movie is the way in which Lance Henriksen, as spooky and canny Mr. Zachary, remains ambiguous in his motives until surprisingly late in the game. Is he Satan or a minion thereof? Or is he a particularly hard-assed angel, one in the service of a Supreme Being who’s a little more Old Testament than we’ve come to expect? Hey, if Christopher Walken and Michael Berryman can play angels, why not Lance Henriksen?

As with too many scripts that take on apocalyptic themes, this one does tend to collapse under its own weight toward the end, especially when it has to invent some novel and counterintuitive theology to make its “gimmick” work. What does work, though, is Don Michael Paul’s direction, which is surprisingly accomplished given the 19-day shooting schedule. The sheer level of detail included — dripping faucets, wallhangings, creaking steps, thundering horsehooves — gives everything a sense of hyperreality and, appropriately for the subject matter, leads the viewer to believe that there are no meaningless details, that everything we see has Meaning.

Such directorial finesse is especially impressive when one considers how clueless Paul seems to be toward the character of Samuel Bozzo’s script. In the commentary, Paul states that he was attracted to the script because it was “a movie that I hadn’t seen before.” Well, yeah, I guess I’ve never actually seen that combination of elements brought together in a single screenplay, but to tout it as wholly original would lead one to assume that this director is unfamiliar with The Seventh Seal (1957), The Shining (1980), The Seventh Sign (1988), The Prophecy (1995), and half of the apocalyptic films released in the leadup to the year 2000. It’s not a single movie we’ve seen before; it’s a whole bunch of movies we’ve seen before. I’m not saying that a movie which grounds itself in the formative religion and mythic archetypes of Judaeo-Christian culture shouldn’t resemble strongly previous treatments of similar themes, but hey, call a spade a spade.

Part the Second: Spoilerful

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to discuss this movie completely without dealing with ultimate revelations (no witticism intended), so consider yourself warned: From this point on, I’m not responsible for ruining the movie for you.

Good guy… Bad guy… All I know is, when this man smiles like this, you swallow hard.

It does indeed turn out that Mr. Zachary is Satan himself, a fact which probably wouldn’t be in doubt for viewers who hadn’t seen some counterintuitive portrayals of angels in the past as I have. He’s not a personification of cartoonish EE-vil, though I won’t go so far as to call him sympathetic, or even Miltonic. Despite his simple existence, he’s something of a libertine, at least as far as David is concerned, nudging him gently toward the easy women in town and the liquor in the cabinet. This Satan is still wounded by his complete rejection by God, whom he still thinks is doing it wrong. His designs upon David have to do with the tree growing on his property, which (as the title of the movie would suggest) is the actual Tree of Life, still guarded by a flaming sword which shows up if anyone gets too close to the fruit. And Satan’s plan is a Rube-Goldberged bit of theology made up from the whole cloth: If he can tempt man to eat this second forbidden fruit, then Armageddon will be reversed, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will instead do Satan’s bidding. (Yeah I know. Makes Rapture theology look positively clearcut by comparison, doesn’t it?)

And though the drama of the movie is well-served by the ambiguity surrounding Mr. Zachary’s true identity, that ambiguity is maintained only by actions which, seen in hindsight from the end of the movie, are counterproductive on Satan’s part. Why does he do so much to arouse Sam’s suspicions? Why does he insist on treating their chess games as metaphors for life lessons? Why does he use Peter Parker as a repeated reference to discuss heroism in extremity? If one were to treat this movie as literary “canon,” i.e. as a perfect artistic expression and therefore everything in it was done right (we just have to figure out how), we might be tempted to assume these actions on Mr. Zachary’s part to show that Satan isn’t necessarily evil and cruel, but merely misguided, and still has it within him to care for and wish the best for Sam. That’s an assumption, however, that I don’t feel called upon to make.

(Oh, and speaking of the several Spider-Man references: If you’re going to try to throw a bone to the fanboys, make sure you know enough to do it right. The Spider-Man comic that Mr. Zachary holds up as his pride and joy very clearly says “Marvel Tales” across the top and is thus a reprint, not the 1964 “first edition” that Mr. Zachary declares it to be. It may seem a pedantic complaint, but in a movie where little details are made to Matter, I’m not going to let anyone off the hook.)

The Garden… of Creative Anachronism.

The final result is a flawed but generally satisfying feature, more “theological thriller” than horror film. Though the final reel proves to be a bit of a letdown as the movie finds itself unable to really deliver the payoffs to justify the setup, thinking about exactly how the movie went wrong may be almost as rewarding as watching a more successful version would have been.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 4
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 3
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• springloaded chickens: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Adam Taylor Gordon (Sam) showed up twice (in different roles) on Enterprise