Many people consider Christopher Walken's finest acting job
to be his roll in The Deer Hunter, the 1978 film
about the effects of Vietnam. He garnered the
Best-Supporting-Actor Oscar for it. However, his true tour
de force is Communion, a greatly under appreciated
film about bad, buggerin' aliens.
Communion
is the film adaptation of nebbishy author Witley Strieber's true
story of alien abduction. "The Visitors," as they are
called, repeatedly kidnapped him and performed horrible
probing maneuvers on him in their spaceship. Christopher
Walken plays Witley Strieber.
What makes the film interesting is that Christopher Walken
manages to make Witley Strieber seem like a normal person.
Walken is so good at playing evil freakouts, that its hard
to remember sometimes that he can also play the Everyman
quite well.
What makes the film INCREDIBLE is that Christopher Walken is
basically cast against a bunch of paper mache puppets, yet
it works. Sometimes the aliens look like cardboard cutouts
on sticks. Some of them look like midgets in Halloween
masks. But Walken manages to make them all ABSOLUTELY
TERRIFYING (I mean more terrifying than midgets in Halloween
masks already are). His roll amounts to a series of
fantastic monologues. The monologues of a desperate man
trying to reason with aliens. Talk to them. Persuade them
from going for his bunghole.
And now, some Web site calling itself "The Doogieland
Amusement Park" has a page devoted to one of the most
horrifying scenes in Communion, the anal probe scene,
complete with pictures and wav files. It is a wonderful
museum.
