KDH Pharmaceutical, THE CONSTANT GARDENER (2005)
This Fernando Meirelles film, based on the novel by John le Carre, announced that the time had come for Big Pharma to join the familiar ranks of oil companies, nuclear power consortiums, and computers programmed to rule the world in the rogue's gallery of villainous movie businesses. KDH, the chief baddie here, has been running unethical drug trials on poor Africans, cynically using the continent's defenseless population as its own guinea pig ranch, and employing a collection of goons to use torture and murder to cover up after itself. Even worse in the eyes of the audience, it has left Ralph Fiennes bereft and inconsolable in the face of the murder of his wife, a whistleblower played by Rachel Weisz. Luckily for the movie, Fiennes and Weisz have real chemistry here, so that when Fiennes loses her and goes into his lonely-guy-with-nothing-left-to-live-for routine, even people who think that government-funded health insurance for sick orphans is a Commie plot want to see the KDH Board of Directors roasted over a slow fire.
Com-Teg: Communications Integrity Associates, THE KILLER ELITE (1975)
This lesser Sam Peckinpah movie stars James Caan and Robert Duvall as partners who work for the "security" firm Com-Teg, whose full name breaks down into an acronym that it shares with a major intelligence division of the United States government, a coincidence that must have shocked the bejesus out of the filmmakers if anyone ever pointed it out to them. (Um.) In the opening sequence, Duvall hands in his resignation by killing the man they're supposed to be guarding and then encourages Caan to take some time out to smell the roses by kneecapping him as he's coming out of the shower. Caan goes through a long, painful process of physical rehabilitation so that he can reclaim his job and see what his old buddy Duvall looks like with his head on backwards, but the suits at the top — cold-bloodedly represented by Gig Young and Arthur Hill, who have a spine-tingling scene together where Young won't let Hill go to the bathroom until they've finished their paperwork — sneer at him as a crippled has-been. This is one of those pictures in which Peckinpah seemed to be using the movie to vent his disgust at the people who'd hired him to make it, as in this speech delivered to Caan by his sidekick, Burt Young: "They're all tryin' to hurt you, Mike! All the goddam power systems! All the wheelers and dealers at the top with their gin and fizzes! They're all full of bullshit!" It's at moments like that, when you see just how many words Burt Young can remember at a stretch, that you know that movies are a miraculous medium.
Silver Shamrock Novelties, HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH (1982)
The third in the series (of eight, not counting the Rob Zombie remake) of Halloween films is easy to distinguish from the others because it's the only one that doesn't feature a knife-wielding, masked psycho named Michael Myers. Instead, its chief menace is an Irish toy magnate, Conal Cochran (played by Dan O'Herlihy, the same snowy-haired old bastard at the head of Omni Consumer Products in Robocop) who objects to the sugary commercialization of Halloween. He's a Celtic old-schooler who wants to restore the holiday's reputation as a time of serious mischief, and towards that goal, he's promoting a special brand of children's masks that will turn the wearers' heads into a puddle of snakes and insects. The movie was intended to kick off a new "anthology" cycle of films that would be made under the Halloween umbrella title but have no connection to the original film, an idea that did not survive this installment's disastrous box office reception. But its memory lives on in the hearts of devotees of corporate supervillains who for some reason have concocted master plans that will result in wiping out their market audience.
The Ventana Nuclear Power Plant, THE CHINA SYNDROME (1979)
One of the big social-problem melodramas of the late seventies, The China Syndrome summed up popular anxiety over the nuclear-power industry by piling every concern and urban myth about the subject onto the fictional Ventana plant, including the conspiracy theory that Karen Silkwood had been the victim of a murder arranged to look like a car accident. (One side effect of this is that when the biopic Silkwood came out four years later, the filmmakers, their thunder stolen, had no ending.) The bigwigs at Ventana, trying to keep reports of a near meltdown off the TV news, have no problem resorting to murder if it helps them cover up the fact that their safety standards would put the fear of God into Montgomery Burns. When the movie opened, George Will wrote a column in Newsweek denouncing the filmmakers who, driven by sheer greed, had slandered an important American institution so carefully managed that no serious power plant accident could ever, ever happen. Twelve days after the movie opened, and with the magazine containing Will's column still on newsstands, it was announced that the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island had experienced a "partial core meltdown." Perhaps the major accomplishment of the movie was to establish that God likes dull movies a lot more than he likes George Will.
The Energy Corporation, ROLLERBALL (1975)
This dystopian sci-fi movie is set in 2018, and its daring hypothesis is that Soylent Green got it all wrong. In the future, the world is controlled by an international group of corporations that cater to our every selfish need while stamping out any trace of individuality or nonconformist thought, but everyone does look well fed. To help keep everyone in contented-sheep mode, chaotic blood sports are used to siphon off the spectators' aggressive impulses. James Caan, the star member of the Houston Rollerball team, runs afoul of John Houseman, the head of the team's parent corporation, who wants him to retire because his exceptionalism poses a threat to the corporations' desire for an undifferentiated, faceless mass over which to rule. Caan balks at this — which must make his ex-girlfriend (Maud Adams) feel just great, because she was taken away from him to be "given" to a corporate executive, and he apparently didn't balk at that. Rollerball is a faded relic of a time when the media had nothing better to wring its hands over than violence in professional sports, but it is easier to take than the 2002 remake, which is set in modern Kazakhstan and dumps the whole global-corporate-mafia element in favor of Jean Reno in Eurotrash finery.
— Paul Clark, Pazit Cahlon, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov, Bryan Whitefield
Check back tomorrow for Parts 3 and 4!