Point a magnifying glass one year before John Hughes’s Home Alone, and you just might find René Manzor’s Deadly Games: Code Santa Claus. Also following a latchkey little boy thwarting home invaders with ingenious booby traps during the holidays, the two films were similar enough for Manzor to threaten Hughes with a lawsuit over stealing his idea.
But when the dust settled, there was one glaring difference. While Home Alone‘s zany family classic went on to spend most of the ’90s as the then-highest grossing comedy of all time, the French Deadly Games spent a paltry one week in Parisian theatres, before puttering off to home video.
What explains the vastly different reception, for what — on the page, at least — are incredibly similar movies? Well, you can start with the fact that Home Alone‘s paint-can swinging deathtraps are at least played for laughs; Deadly Games’s maze of horrors doesn’t let its audience off the hook just because it’s Christmas. From stabbings, to shootings, to toy grenades filled with actual gunpowder, the only reason you’d call someone a “wet bandit” here is for how much fake blood they may have accidentally left the set still covered in.
So when judging the fortunes of the even more violent, though surprisingly Christmassy Novocaine, there may be reason to worry. The Jack Quaid action vehicle arrives almost as far from its holiday setting as imaginable, while the Saw-esque gore may make the rom-com at its heart a no-go as far as date movies are concerned.
But if we’re just judging on merit, never fear; Novocaine is, in a word, amazing. Though if we’re using two, it would be amazingly gross.
WATCH | Novocaine trailer:
To be fair, that latter description — and a potentially ill-advised conceit — do work against the movie. Following the aptly named Nathan Caine (Jack Quaid), Novocaine uses the historically fraught Hollywood recipe of misinterpreting a niche medical malady for a bit of cultural commentary.
It’s far from alone in doing so. Throw a stone down silver screen hallways and you’re bound to hit an example, like Robin Williams’s Jack, or Brad Pitt’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button liberally adapting rapid-aging disease progeria into a “carpe diem” plot device for their characters.
Novocaine opts for an even rarer condition for its premise. Here, Caine has CIPA (congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis). Just like it says on the tin, that means our otherwise mild-mannered assistant bank manager is impervious to the pokes, prods and punctures that would leave the rest of us howling.
Impervious, at least, to the pain. As we learn from lonely online conversations with his only friend, Roscoe (Jacob Batalon), and the new colleague he’s quickly falling for, Sherry (Amber Midthunder), he can absolutely still get injured.
Because of that, he’s lived his life in careful fear. He never chews solid foods — to avoid accidentally biting off his own tongue. He installs a temperature mark on his shower handle, since he wouldn’t be able to feel if the water was hot enough to scald. And he’s spent his life as a homebody, just to avoid the risk of stepping on a nail. After all, he’d only realize once his shoe filled up with blood — something he horrifyingly knows from experience.
But when a group of Santa-disguised robbers (remember, it’s Christmas!) assault his bank, kill the manager and take Sherry as a hostage, Caine and his uniquely disgusting superpower get the green light to go.
The moral of not letting fear stand in the way of happiness barely gets its footing with Caine finally trying solid food (“That’s what pie is?!” he shouts in one of the movie’s most watchable moments) before he’s off to the races. He’s soon dunking his hand in hot fryer grease to win gunfights, and taking arrows to — then, sickeningly, through — the knee in order to stab unfortunate goons on the other end.
And he caps it all off with a blood-gushing coup de grâce likely to leave you fist pumping with one hand, and shielding your eyes with the other.
It’s a consistently ridiculous, but consistently committed formula that knows how to keep upping the ante while still delivering the goods. Quaid’s surefooted straight-man timing keeps the plot both grounded and ridiculous enough to make you forgive the many, many implausibilities of a movie that doesn’t want you to take it too seriously.
And the inventively grotesque body-horror slowly growing under his increasingly destroyed suit works surprisingly well, despite being little more than a gimmick. That’s because, from a script standpoint, it’s tied so firmly to both the plot and to Caine’s character evolution. It’s done so efficiently in fact, it’s hard to complain that Novocaine is essentially just a combination of two of this year’s worst movies (The Monkey and Love Hurts), except that it’s good.
Sick metaphors
That said, if I was critic and Illness as Metaphor author Susan Sontag, I might complain that Novocaine is a perfect example of a ubiquitous literary impulse: The writerly instinct to use sickness as a symbolic representation of a character’s motivations.
Or more usually, when a character’s sickness is used as a metaphor for their deepest personal failings. Their ability — or failure to — triumph over that sickness then becomes a judgment of their own will and strength. And despite the fact that illness should come with no moral or character judgments at all, it eventually becomes how we think about the sick outside of stories.
It’s a real, and occasionally damaging, tendency. It’s why casting cancer as a “battle” which a patient either wins or loses is increasingly seen as a faux pas. It’s why leprosy’s connection with the unclean, running as far back as the Bible, saw Hawaiian officials spend a century dumping the afflicted on an otherwise uninhabited peninsula, despite the disease being very lowly contagious.
Look no further than Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice for cholera’s misrepresentation: There, sickness of the body has been metaphorically tied to sickness of the soul so successfully it’s led whole communities to refuse treatment. It has justified policy failures, romanticized suffering and helped transform both asymptomatic disease-carrier Typhoid Mary and unwilling medical research patient Henrietta Lax into simplified symbols for human suffering, more than complex people who really lived.
That’s definitely a narrative laziness Novocaine falls prey to. But there are at least two defences shielding it from dangerous territory. The first is its rarity: aside from a single episode of House and a similar, though unrelated condition shown in 2010’s Kick-Ass, CIPA doesn’t have much of a representation track record.
And given that its real-life incidence is roughly one in 125 million people, the condition hasn’t (and likely won’t) gain enough portrayal to have audiences demanding CIPA superheroes defend them day to day.
The second is that outrageous, kill-of-the-week goriness. Novocaine very quickly, and very effectively, presents itself as something that shouldn’t be taken seriously. And while the stomach-churning lengths it goes to may keep some audience members out of the theatre, the ones who stay are in for a treat.
That is, if they keep from covering their eyes through the worst of it.
