Boxing Helena (1993)

Obsession in a Box

"Boxing Helena" is the pretentious art house disaster that simultaneously began and ended Jennifer Lynch's directorial career. Wanting to follow in her father David's footsteps, Jennifer focused on the freakish. She cast Julian Sands as an uptight Englishman with mother issues,and gave Art Garfunkel his last screen appearance so far.

Julian Sands is a doctor who grew up in the shadow of the Venus de Milo and his rejecting,promiscuous mother. Of course,he's an excitable boy. He falls in love with his neighbor Helena (Sherilyn Fenn,in a role that Kim Basinger rightly rejected) She frolics in the fountain at his party,since this is an art house movie. He sees her treat her boyfriend (Bill Paxton,as a redneck) terribly. Still,he's smitten. He causes a "convenient" accident,nursing her in his home. It becomes surreal as Sands removes Fenn's limbs. There are some "erotic" love scenes,but they'll cause derisive rather than ecstatic laughter. In the end, Sands wakes up;it's all been a dream. And a nightmare for the audience. It's as sensual as MSG-saturated boxed Chinese restaurant leftovers.

"Boxing Helena" deserves to stay in its box. July 17, 2008

A Farewell To Arms....And Legs

This is a hard movie to defend, so most of the time I don't even bother to try. I really won't even try now, but just say that I really like this movie and I'm not sure why. It's reputation as a lousy film is almost legendary. Of course when you consider Michael Bay's filmography, you might want to re-evaluate this movie, or maybe not.
Julian Sands(an actor I love) is a rich surgeon obsessed with a woman he had a one nighter with. The woman, Helena, is played by Sherilyn Fenn, so it's easy to understand his obsession. However, Helena is a crass, mean, all around unpleasant woman who's on the search solely for boytoys. Julian's attempts to lure her in result in her being hit by a car. He now has the perfect opportunity to posses her as he brings her back to his home and begins a process of dismembering her. Julian quits his job and cuts off communication with his friends, even dumping his girlfriend so he can take care of Helena. She throws endless insults at him, screams at him, belittles him, and it makes you wonder just what it is that he's so in love with. Psychological games are played out between the two, and soon some sex is thrown into the mix(Sands brings home one of his tasty looking nurses and makes Helena watch him have sex with her to everybody's favorite Enigma song, Sadness Part 1). Meanwhile, Helena's sortaboyfriend, Bill Paxton, is trying to find out what happened to her. Now, this plot may sound kinda grim and gruesome, but it really isn't quite as demented as you'd think. I don't know why, but the movie sort of reminds me of one of those softcore Skinemax type movies even though there isn't much sex in it. Sands gives a decent performance, but his character is such a pathetic, whiny, lovestruck schmuck that you just wish you could reach into the tv and smack him one. As usual, Fenn will make your eyes bug out like something from a Looney Tunes cartoon. Yummy!! Apparently Madonna was originally supposed to have this role, and then the role went to Kim Basinger after Madonna dropped out. Personally I'm glad neither of them got it coz Fenn's my baby.
So no, I can't honestly recommend this movie to people coz the numbers say you might not care much for this one. I'm just here to tell you that I like it. So there. March 26, 2008

Just Odd

Julian Sands notwithstanding, this is a very odd movie - lives up to it's director's name (Jennifer Lynch is David's daughter), but something's missing - very near soft-core porn. November 4, 2007

THE MOST UNINTENTIONALLY HILARIOUS 104 MINUTES OF 1993!

Everyone loves a good smoking ruin of a movie. Witness the popularity of fascinating train wrecks like Crimes of Passion, Hudson Hawk and Last Action Hero, each infinitely more entertaining in their own way than a truckload of Oscar-winners. There are few pleasures to rival the completely sedentary evening spent with your most sardonic friends cackling like freshmen on hallucinogens at movies like Boxing Helena.

Boxing Helena turned out to be one of the most hilarious 104 minutes of 1993. The initial buzz that surrounded the film -- insistently referring to it as "bound to be controversial"-- all but assassinated any potential audience this uproarious trash may have had to begin with. It was said that people who actually saw it tried to get their money back from embarrassed, albeit non-budging, theater managers. But for lovers of Bad Movies, owning the film is a whole other story. When you pop this into the DVD player at home with friends, you welcome the ridiculous plot and anticipate the ludicrous transformation Sherilynn Fenn will go through. Furthermore, Helena takes itself so seriously that we can only respond with gales of derisive crowing.

Fenn plays a convincing man-eating b-tch who makes the mistake of sleeping (just once) with Julian Sands, a prominent surgeon, and obviously some sort of thumbsucking psycho whose mother used to parade around the house naked. Obsessed with Fenn, although she'd rather be bulldozed by a speeding truck than speak with him, Sands climbs a tree to spy on her in her bedroom, makes covert phone calls, and eventually throws a party for her. She comes, dances in the fountain (no kidding, our favorite scene) and, natch, leaves with another guy. This gets our flipped-out doc all steamed up and, apparently, sends him over the edge.

Soon enough, kismet strikes. Party-girl Fenn gets bulldozed by a speeding truck right outside Sands's estate, and the next thing we know she wakes up without legs in his mansion. Not in the best of moods, she berates him, screams her head off and throws anything she can get her hands on across the room. Can't have that, Sands concludes, and soon she's armless too, which is revealed to us when he's spoonfeeding her. "I have just one question..." she begins with a straight face. Just try to stem the reflex to ask -- for her -- "Where the hell are my arms?"

As improbable as it may seem, she grows to love him (sure, We'd fall in love with someone who cut off our arms and legs, too). That does not, however, stop her incessant talking, and we can only presume that Sands would have gotten around to cutting her head off as well, if the movie hadn't ended first. Fenn and Sands are both hopelessly earnest, while the supporting cast either has a superb handle on this nonsense (witness Bill Paxton's shag-haired rock stud) or seems to have wandered in off the street: Art Garfunkel, as Sands's pal, sits around in a silent daze as if someone told him Paul Simon was supposed to show up.

This is the movie that Kim Basinger had to fight like heck to get out of, not to mention cough up a hefty fine -- the best few mil she ever spent. As for writer/director Jennifer Lynch, (weirdo daughter of David), the 23-year-old director, who posed for press shots in front of the Venus de Milo and talked about how we're all in our own boxes, you've got to give it to her -- at least she makes us laugh -- if not with her.
July 29, 2007

Totally gutless on the follow through...

Boxing Helena for me is the perfect example of potential-wasting, gutless filmmaking. Warning, spoilers follow. Philippe Caland and Jennifer Lynch presented a genuinely interesting and bold plot, that of a masochistic, mother-obsessed doctor (Nick) who desperately latches onto Helena, a beautiful temptress who wants nothing to do with him. Nick, after having inherited his mother's palatial estate and running into Helena in a bar, decides to throw an impromptu house warming party as cover for inviting Helena into his home where she yet again rebuffs his advances. Nick then lures her back to his house where she is accidentally hit by a car and has her legs horrible crushed. Being a brilliant surgeon, Nick manages to save her life though he amputates both of her legs, and it's at this point that the film becomes both remarkable and lackluster at the same time.

Jennifer Lynch, daughter of filmmaker David Lynch, seems as if she's taking a page out of her father's surreal dream-logic filmmaking book as Nick keeps Helena prisoner and begins to slowly and literally deconstruct Helena limb by limb until she's truly an object of his desire. Helena, on the other hand, spends her time digging into Nick's psyche, taunting his manhood and in a very demented twist, falling in love with him, I believe based purely on his desire for her, which transcends physical beauty (something she is used to men fawning over.) Unfortunately this second act is severely hampered by pointless complexity (in terms of the number of characters in the film) and some very forced and unconvincing performances (namely by Bill Paxton who's trying his best to invoke his character Sevren from Near Dark and Sherilyn Fenn whose stoicism is almost laughable.)

Though the acting is generally bad and the directing generic, the plot would save this otherwise mundane film, but this to is thrashed by a very trite and gutless third act that ends with an ambiguous twist ending, which implies that the entire second act was either a hallucination or a dream. 2 stars for the plot, but only two because it was handled terribly.
May 3, 2007

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