Oscar Horrors: The Death-Defying Effects of 'Death Becomes Her'

Oscar Horrors continues...

Here lies...the 1992 Oscar for Visual Effects – err, here he would be lying, lamenting his fate as a reward to the f/x folks behind Batman Returns or Alien 3, had he not been bewitched by Isabella Rossellini's youth potion. Now, he stands immortal on a mantle shared by Ken Ralston, Doug Chiang, Tom Woodruff Jr. and Douglas Smythe, who brought you the butt-tightening, head-twisting, belly-blasting cinemagic of Robert Zemeckis's Death Becomes Her.

Kurt here. I LOVE this movie – or should I say, I'm "Mad as Hel" for it. Regardless of what it might say about me, it's a major film of my youth. Prepping for this post, I planned to just skip around and watch the expensive effects scenes, but by the time a grossly overweight and psychotically vengeful Goldie Hawn was twisting her hankie and growling through gritted teeth, "I want to talk about Madeline Ashton," I was hooked yet again and watched the entire thing. Flaws be damned, Death Becomes Her is so funny and so cleanly paced. There's hardly a wasted moment. It's packed with great sequences (such as the tongue-in-cheek imagined plot in which Hawn's Helen Sharp tells Bruce Willis's Ernest Menville how they're going to drug and kill Meryl Streep's Madeline), but what it's most remembered for are its nifty visual tricks, which support the crimes-against-nature moral by serving up the comic mutilation of two A-List actresses' undead bodies.

The film's centerpiece scene is one that sees all secrets revealed. After being pushed down a marble staircase by Ernest, an incident that twists her into a pretzel and makes a periscope of her head and neck, a pulseless Madeline takes her rage out on Helen, whose gut she blows a hole in with a double-barrel shotgun. When Helen stands up, it's clear both women have drunk the neon pink Kool-Aid, which gives eternal life, for better or worse. What follows is a shovel duel that, for me, is quite iconic, beginning with the immortal line, "On guard – bitch!"

In general, I'm no more easily surprised than the next seasoned moviegoer, but when it comes to visual effects, I do tend to be a "how'd they do that?" kind of person. For example, even looking back at a film from nearly 20 years ago (wow), I'm not sure how that Oscar-crowned quartet was able to seamlessly present Hawn with a dinner-plate-sized hole in her mid-section, through which you can clearly see the rest of the scenery. At one point during the duel, Helen sits down on a couch that's been speared with a broken shovel handle, and she lets the handle poke through her new orifice. There's a flash where you can see the handle nudge the edge of the hole. Streep's rubbery neck is one thing, but how'd they do that?

If you ask me, the true visual effects of Death Becomes Her are Hawn and Streep themselves, which sounds like a gooey cliché, but never, ever have these two ladies looked more breathtaking than they do in this movie. Streep was 43, Hawn was 45, and both looked utterly flawless, like they'd never passed age 32. The irony, of course, is that watching this movie now gives you a sting that validates Rossellini's rants about "life's cruel curse," and reminds of how even stunning actresses are slave to the ticking clock. Which is certainly not to say that time hasn't been kind to both ladies (it has), but you can't help but wonder if, when they revisit Death Becomes Her, they wish they had just a couple drops of that pink stuff.

"Do you remember where you parked the car?"

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Take Three: Isabella Rossellini

Craig here with Take Three. Today: Isabella Rossellini

Take One: Blue Velvet (1986)
“She... Wore... Bluuuuuue Vel-vet.” Indeed she did: bluer than velvet was the night. Ladies and gentlemen, Rossellini was the Blue Lady, Miss Dorothy Vallens, in David Lynch’s mid-eighties masterpiece Blue Velvet. Vallens was a tortured torch singer, a gas-guzzling freakopath Frank Booth’s (Dennis Hopper) late-night inviter and pervy amateur detective Jeffrey Beaumont’s (Kyle MacLachlan) sexual initiation vixen. And yet, behind it all, lay a fretful wife and mother. Rossellini’s introductory scene in the film showed her as a midnight siren, a depressed blue dahlia who, once done with her sad, strange rendition of Bobby Vinton’s titular song, seems to dematerialise into a pair of Lynch’s signature red curtains.

 After she finds snooping Jeffrey in her closet she’s both defender of her home and explorer of her own dark thoughts. She’s furious, but as excited by the imminent enveloping mystery as he is; you can just make out the glimmer of utter thrill creep across Rossellini’s face as she jabs his cheek with a breadknife. Here's to Rossellini for nearly making Dorothy as kinky as her male lead. She doesn’t so much break the fourth wall as demolish it, with an infuriated stare and exclamation to camera (“Grand Central Station!”) when more than one guest visits her gloomy apartment at once.

More of the sublime Saddest Music within Blue Velvet, plus the ageless silliness of Death Becomes Her after the jump.

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