Review: The Borrower (1991)
Directed by: John McNaughton
Starring: Rae Dawn Chong, Don Gordon, Tom Towles
Written by: Mason Nage, Richard Fire
Music by: Ken Hale, Steven A. Jones, Robert McNaughton
Country: United States
Available on: Blu-ray (Scream Factory)
IMDb
Director John McNaughton stepped confidently into the horror scene with his low-budget, grimy, harrowing peek at psychopathic savagery with Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986). That film is generally hailed as a classic wielding a disturbing sense of realism that hits uncomfortably close to home. So, naturally, McNaughton followed that up with another slice of unsettling cinema verité documenting a serial killer, The Borrower (1991). Wait. No. Well … uh, sorta? There is a serial killer! But The Borrower is actually a tonally rambunctious, silly, at-times pretty funny but also very aimless, and bloody flick about an alien serial killer banished to earth in a human form that occasionally deteriorates to the point of spontaneous head explosion, leaving him to steal (“borrow” is very generous) replacement heads from passers-by.
The concept is bizarre as hell and just sort of nonchalantly put out there for the audience to roll with. It’s a horrifically rich setup that leads to some messy gore gags and a few genuine chuckles as the alien learns to operate human physiology. But McNaughton and the screenwriting team of Mason Nage and Richard Fire don’t really know how to pass the time. The Borrower kind of bounces here and there with no real inertia and a whole lot of uncertainty about what tone to strike. For every moment of dark slapstick comedy, there’s a weirdly serious subplot about the PTSD of domestic abuse, a punk rock band filming a music video while their parents watch Garbage Pail Kids upstairs, or a lazy swing at social commentary, in particular the class warfare of New York City in the ‘80s. Thanks to its setting, McNaughton captures some of the grit of Henry, but he very often loses track of what he’s doing. The movie’s scatterbrained M.O. is kind of endearing, though, because whatever the hell The Borrower is doing, it’s doing in a way other films definitely aren’t.
Raw Dawn Chong and Don Gordon are two detectives fruitlessly pursuing the alien, but they seem to be having a good old time pretending to be boiled harder than the average cop that have apparently never operated a firearm before, wielding that power in service of keeping the alleys of NYC free of urine. The music, which has the same bouncy, rhythmic, composed-with-only-a-guitar-and-an-808 energy of something like Demons (1985), helps enhance the film’s time and place. The “I guess let’s stop filming here” ending is sudden, unfulfilling, but I suppose appropriately languid. Outside of one scene of dog-headed carnage, the alien falls disappointingly short in following the advice given to him to leverage his ingenuity — a line that promises way more zany body horror than the movie delivers.
Frankly, I don’t know what to make of this. My brain is telling me this haphazard thing is just barely on the right side of disaster, but my heart feels some kind of vague, abnormal satisfaction with The Borrower’s strange malaise.
Overall rating: 6.5 out of 10
