Monster Capsules: BAD DREAMS, THE ROOST, DAMNATION ALLEY, AFTER MIDNIGHT, TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE

 

 BAD DREAMS

1988 - directed by Andrew Fleming - ***

This is a film that took a long hard look at the Nightmare on Elm Street box office receipts and said me too, even going so far as to cast the same final girl of Nightmare 3: Dream Warriors, Jennifer Rubin, to play basically the same role in basically the same mental hospital. Instead of a Freddie there's Harris, a scarred cult leader played by real life burn victim Richard Lynch. In the 70s prologue he coaxes his hippie flock, "Unity Field" to burn themselves alive in order to unify their souls. Rubin is the only survivor, pulled from the roaring flames, full head of hair intact, and in a coma. When she awakens its 13 years later and she's stuck in a mental ward and, in the 80s. Jeffrey (Reanimator) Combs is the strange, handsome shrink who brings her to group therapy in order to introduce us to a rapidly bumped-off set of characters. A stressed Rubin sees Harris before each murder. The unified soul thing apparently worked, and he's recruiting new acolytes from the therapy group, but try explaining that to hospital staff, and cops who just think they all committed suicide 'cuz they're crazy.

The creepiest aspect here is surely Richard Lynch as the cult leader. It looks like he insisted on having a textured flame retardant gel around his face at all times which seems wise considering the amount of flame he's exposed to (and his real life burns). This Lee Strasberg-trained and scary-funny as all hell actor makes a greet creepy villain, but he's not a convincing cult leader. Look at that picture above, would you want to follow him? A cult leader needs to be seductive as well as creepy. Could you imagine Robert Englund running a cult? It's hard not to imagine a more nuanced cobra-hypnotic figure of menace like Lance Henriksen or Michael Ironside (the heavy over on the Shout blu-ray companion film Visiting Hours) in the role. No offense to Lynch meant. Maybe I'm jealous because I've always felt I'd make a great cult leader, and my dad was always urging it on me, saying that's where the real money is. In other words, I want my own Unified Field!

The rest of the cast is also very good in that 80s teen horror sort of way. Sharp-eyed punk rock fans will feel strangely drawn to Susan Barnes (Ladies and Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains, Repo Man) and the terrifying Dean Cameron will linger in your mind thanks to his amok basement leaping high in the air and punching out light bulbs. As Pauline Kael might say, he all but smashes his way through a hole in the picture. Rubin is very good at wearing her emotions on her sleeve and the Shout blu-ray reveals how good the DP is at capturing the glisten in her eyes So yeah, it grows on you, separating itself from Freddie Krueger comparisons as it matures. A lot of that probably has to do with its incomparable pedigree: Gale Ann Terminator Hurd produced, and Andrew The Craft Fleming directed.

THE ROOST

2005 - directed by Ti West - ***

Ti West's first film, hampered only by his inability apparently to motivate actors into a state of wakefulness, The Roost is a surprisingly engaging work of horror retro minimalism. Even the carload of mumblecore hipsters are bearable, thanks to their low-key dialogue delivery, their voices low so as not to disrupt our fading attention span. Taking mid shortcut along a mysterious road on their way to a wedding, a bat flies into the windshield causing a crash! Cue a kind of Jim Jarmusch version of Planet Terror on a Plan Nine budget. Which means of course that I loved it.

The acting is pretty bland (with the exception of great newcomer Vanessa Horneff) It's hard not to be awed by West's unshakable grasp of what makes horror work, doing as little as possible: his minimalist tendencies are so poetically integrated he can confidently throw most of the usual horror symbols and dross away and rewrite some of what does. Close-ups of doors slowly opening, for example, are presented completely out of context (we have no idea whose opening the door or from whose perspective is watching the door open) and for some reason is scary because we don't even know who's opening the door or who's not answering it. He also makes great use of tick-tock momentum, 16mm grain, droning ambient score, remote location (the same barn used in Marnie!), diegetic (headlights, porch, dashboard) light that makes the swallowing all-consuming darkness of a lonely rural shortcut palpable, and when the score's not overburdened with overdone cello music there's great, Avant Carpenter atonal drones. That doesn't sound like much on 'paper' but it's all the spookier for being so 'found art.' Too bad there's dull stretches of horror host filler with Tom Noonan underplaying to the point of sad distraction. If nothing else, it contextualizes the inner film proper, adding a whole new chill by association.

TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE

1990 - Directed by John Harrison - **1/2

Michael "Ajax" Remar is a struggling artist whose life is spared by an inner city gargoyle and falls for Rae Dawn Chong on the same night and has never seen Kwaidan (1964), so never puts two and two together; a young Christian Slater, young Julianne Moore, and young Steve Buscemi encounter a shambling mummy (from an Arthur Conan Doyle story); Deborah Harryis a Hansel-baking Martha Stewart in the framing device; David Johansen is a cat assassin hired by wheelchair bound William Hickey (the unforgettable old don in Prizzi's Honor) in a segment conceived by Stephen King and scripted by George Romero. It all comes together to no avail in this odd horror anthology.

I've never been a fan of horror anthologies (except Kwaidan), too many get hung up on the tired old EC supernatural comeuppance bit and I have the same problems with Darkside. Even Debbie Harry is surprisingly flavorless as the cannibal gourmet. Haha! The script's loaded with that kind of thing, but there's so many essential cult actor favorites (I always imagine how great James Remar would have been in The Terminator) and future stars that it's still essential viewing, even if only while drunk, half-asleep, stoned out of your gourd, and/or in a half-distracted haze.

AFTER MIDNIGHT

1995 - dir. the Wheat Brothers - ***

At last, a trilogy free of 'supernatural comeuppance.' Underrated fringe weirdo Ramy Zada goes for distance as the psychology teacher who pulls a gun out a snickering jock to teach his class about fear. Said jock is pissed (literally) and later breaks in to the teacher's house to kill him. But Zada's upstairs conducting a ghost story round robin with some of his cutest student because hey, it's a dark and stormy night. And hey, one of the students is a psychic who senses something wicked's coming up from the basement...

I dug the middle segment best, with its looney tunes midnight warehouse dog attack a riveting centerpiece. Most critics prefer the final story, wherein a stalker goes after a celebrity's answering service operator, played by the always worthwhile Marg Helgenberger. Make sure you stick around for the bizarre conclusion of Ramy Zada's framing device round robin, wherein a burnt skeleton chases the psychic girl with an axe through all the other sets in a vague nod to the climax of The Terminator.  It's all just more proof that less is more when it comes to horror: Darkside (above)has the money but can't venture out of its predictable DC Comics House of Mystery vibe, while After Midnight quits all sense of consensual reality, throws its meager budget at the screen as a distraction and lunges straight for the nightmare logic jugular.

DAMNATION ALLEY

1977 - Directed by Jack Smight - ** 

(for male viewers who were kids in the 70s - ****)

Not an easy film to love but, for some of us, loving Damnation Alley is a challenge that beckons like Everest. We really want, even need, to love it, but the film goes out of its way to suck. Still, if you were a boy in the 70s and read Famous Monsters of Filmland, chances are you longed to take that climb, to escape your parents in that cool armored cruiser (above) and set out across a nuclear landscape populated by almost nothing except giant scorpions, massive deluges of not-quite-giant man-eating ants, psychotic rednecks, and cool shit to jump over on the attached motor bike. After the bombs fall there shall be no driving or drinking ages, no need for money, no homework, and no girls gumming up the works (if there is a girl let her be an easygoing French Hawksian rather than a bossy, overprotective Fordian). It's a boy's life fantasy of being taught to fire rooftop rocket launchers as soon as you're old enough to see over the steering column.

Directed by Jack Smight, who gave us such other awful bit irresistible films as Midway and Airport 1975, Damnation Alley is a film as wholesome in its fashion as reading Boy's Life magazine at a cub scouts meeting before going out back to light fireworks and shoot bb guns. George Peppard is the 'dad' character - identifiable via his terrible fake mustache; Jan Michael Vincent is the starry-eyed older brother who gets the girl and lets you ride his cool motorbike; the girl is a young Meryl Streep-style French beauty (Dominique Sanda) picked up in a deserted sand-swept ant-infested Vegas; Paul Winfield is the black guy, eaten early as was, and sadly still is, the custom.

The film begins in one of the best nuclear war recreations in film history: no drama, no hand-wringing, just by-the-book monitoring of screens at a remote missile silo deep in the American southwest; no women or bleeding hearts, no morality or ethics or drama. A few years go by and a chain reaction at their remote facility makes sticking around inadvisable, as well as trimming the survivors down to a handful, who take to the road in two big armored party vans (the budget only allows for one, so we seldom see them together without a mirror).

Myriad technical difficulties aside, this has to overall be the mellowest post-nuclear war movie of the 70s or ever - mostly driving through psychedelic electric storms, a strange flood (luckily these vehicles float, too) and across endless deserts. Even the arrival of a kid isn't cause for alarm, since he's played by the perennially feral Jackie Earle Haley.

I almost never find anything disparaging to say about Shout Factory, who have been cleaning up and releasing to blu-ray a vast host of sci fi and horror titles from the 70s and 80s that would likely be forgotten or bungled otherwise. The blu-ray of Damnation Alley is amazing overall, with groovy deep blacks. But some of the outdoor scenes don't stack up to the Amazon streaming instant video version, wherein the sky is a sark almost psychedelic green-blue. In the Shout version the sky has been cleaned up to a 'normal' sickly pale normal sky color that's just not as cool. Did the restorers think the intense colors of the original sky (and the action all blurry like your looking through seriously dark shades) was some kind of mistake? Did they not get that the world is over and the outdoors is fucked?

Otherwise I can't complain; and having it on blu-ray is a 70s boyhood dream come true for a once-lost generation.

Top: Amazon Instant Video / Bottom: Shout blu-ray

Read More

Monster Capsules: BIG ASS SPIDER, WAKE WOOD, WOMAN IN BLACK, DRACULA, PRINCE OF DARKNESS, VALLEY OF GWANGI

BIG ASS SPIDER

2013 - ***

A sometimes not wince-inducing monster film, Big Ass Spider shows director Mike Mendez knows how to keep a low budget giant monster flick fleet-footed. Greg Grunberg (Alias, Heroes) shoots for a Seth Rogen vibe as the semi-dopey exterminator who "thinks likes a spider" and really wants a girlfriend, a combination that eventually proves even to the military he's the best man for the job of tracking and wrangling the titular amok experiment. First it gets loose inside a hospital, then grows to titanic proportions, grabs the hottie lieutenant Grunberg likes and climbs a downtown L.A. office building. Playing a kind of PG version of Seth's unforgettable psychopath in 2009's Observe and Report, Grunberg walks against the tide of fleeing extras in slow-mo to a haunting cover of the Pixies' "Where is My Mind" and even if the film defies regulations by showing full monster too early, and even though the thundering orchestral library military leitmotif quickly wearies the nerves, low-key bemusement endures throughout. Ray Wise (Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks) is the head of the military clean-up squad that at first wants nothing to do with Grunberg; Clare Kramer is the hottie lieutenant who winds up all webbed up and waiting. Lombardo Boyar is a kind of less funny Michael Peña from Observe and Report (my review here). That's not a dis on Boyar, he's great, but Peña is hilarious because he's genuinely dangerous, Boyar is merely genial. If Pauline Kael had been alive to praise Observe and Report in 2009 she would, and maybe it wouldn't have bombed. She'd probably also enjoy, to a point, Big Ass Spider, because she liked bad bug movies. She was a great, great lady, man.

WAKE WOOD

2010 - ***

Hammer is back, with this keen medley of Monkey's Paw-ish family grief, Wicker Man pagan rural secrets, and the terrifying child who kills for no apparent reason motifs. When a veterinarian (Aidan Gillen) moves his family to the small rural England town of the title and his daughter has her throat torn out by a guard dog, the townsfolk (led by Mike Leigh-regular Timothy Spall) spill their secret: the town is cursed/blessed with the ability to restore the suddenly dead to life for three days so loved ones can say their proper good-bye. But the grief-stricken mother (Eva Barthistle - who was in the similar The Children two years earlier) doesn't want to let her go when time's up. Ungrateful woman! Soon the child's using telekinesis in combination with a crowbar to off the protesting locals and her dull yellow raincoat in the dark woods conjures vaguely Don't Look Now-ish unease. What do the dead locals care, though, when they can always come back for a visit? Aside from a heart being ripped out, some gory deaths, and dying farm animals, there's not much gore. Ahhahah that's a joke. It's Hammer!

WOMAN IN BLACK

2012 - ***1/2

Hammer does it again! They are really on a second roll, and despite the immense attention to Edwardian period detail, Woman in Black is never stuffy and really rather ripping, with a surprisingly solid Daniel Radcliffe as a London lawyer sent, Harker-style, to inventory a dark decaying mansion. There's a great metaphysical shocker ending involving a speeding train, and the woman in black turns out to be a vindictive wraith like Eva Graps and her ghost daughter rolled into one malevolent spirit. If the story follows a too familiar pattern (Dark Water / Ringu meets some Innocents), hey, Hammer practically invented this shit. The ample presence of tight-lipped, suspicious locals at the inn harkens back to the days when a crisply attired Peter Cushing would get a similar cold shoulder and the sense of pacing is superb, even with lots of Radcliffe running around the dark mansion with his drippy candle --the sort of thing I generally find tedious but here is done briskly with the dark always a breath away from swallowing Radcliffe whole. Director James Watkins shows that the chilling power of his Eden Lake (2008) was no fluke, that he is not afraid of bleak but compelling endings, and that he is a force on the scene poised to become the next Terence Fisher.

 DRACULA PRINCE OF DARKNESS

1966 - **1/2

Then again, even Terence Fisher isn't always Terence Fisher, such as in this 2nd entry in Hammer's Dracula series, which I'd been struggling to see for a long time, there having been only a terribly washed out non-anamorphic old Anchor Bay disc which I could never get into, thanks to my allergy to washed-out colors and non-anamorphic framing. Well, this new blu-ray version is gorgeous proof it wasn't just the non-anamorphic washed-out aspects that stopped my enjoyment. Even pristine and robustly colored it's a bit of a dull, silly mess. Most of this movie consists of posh Brits leisurely debating whether to spend the night at Dracula's castle. Once Christopher Lee is revived he seems to resent having to wear fangs again and the script thinks one can make a cross out of just about anything (stopping just short of the old crossed fingers trick scared kids are so fond of -see also: my piece on the confusion of symbols and reality in horror films over on Divinorum Psychonauticus), and here's another thing I never understood: if you want to keep vamps away, just eat garlic! Don't hang it in garlands so some hypnotized maid can come remove it. It makes no sense when you can just poison the food supply directly to just put a bottle of poison in the kitchen and think that will do the trick.

Oh well, the blu-ray is delicious with rich sickly gold yellows and a 3-D-ish feeling of the dimensions and spaces of the castle. That's fortunate, as there's not much else to do in this film aside from watching idiots leaving each other behind to go investigate sounds, saying they'll be right back and never returning. While Darwin chuckles from on high we're forced to count the minutes as we're shown every last real-time moment involved in stringing a person up by his feet and slitting their throat over a big stone trough full of Drac ashes. I remembered that scene from my childhood (swirling it up with Horror Express), but not the cracked ice finale. I must have blocked it out. Good lord, it's not even cold out and here's this convenient 'frozen pond' so close to the castle it makes no architectural sense. If that sort of thing doesn't bother you, and you don't mind watching actors feeling uncomfortably under-directed, as if their marks had been drawn in wind, well enjoy. At least Drac's got good taste in brides. When he punks out hottie Barbara Shelley we all benefit since she finally lowers her beautiful red hair and neckline.

VALLEY OF GWANGI

1969- **

Here's a bizarre mix of devotional Harryhausen animation and unconscious cowboy brutality that feels why too dated for 1969. The tedious story involves a posse of rodeo cowboys led by James Franciscus stumbling onto a desert paradise hidden from man. It looks almost the exact same as the depressing lifeless desert they just were traversing, with no sort of ecosystem on evidence remotely close to being able to realistically nourish apex predators like the Allosaurus (colored purple here, for reasons which I'm sure exist). I haven't read up on anything dinosaur-related since third or fourth grade but I still knew more than the alleged paleontologist riding with the cowboys. At one point he even calls a dinosaur a "styranosaurus!" which I presume is his shorthand for tyrannosaurus and styracosaurus, since his mutton chops and teeth are so bogus it must be hard for him to enunciate two such Latin syllable-enriched names in one sentence. At least he knows to get out of the sun when it's time for the Allopsaureuys / Styrackosauss smack-down!

And no disrespect meant to the great Harryhausen but there's only so many times you can watch creatures who could never survive in their depicted ecosystem mix it up in a flat ugly middle shot diorama desert (these films always imagine dinosaurs as being in the desert since that's where the bones are found, which is rawther ridiculous) and here their monochrome purple colors and lack of close-up inserts make them look like plastic kid's toys. So even if those toys come to brilliant slithering life under Harryhausen's patient hand, it never really adds up to anything anyone other than a very indulgent dinosaur fan kid would like. Harryausen's no slouch; he even animates the eohippus when a movie this cheap and meant for kids would usually have regular pony footage shrunk and overlaid, but it's not even as interesting as a typical arc in Land of the Lost.

So yeah, I tried to love it as long as I can remember, but I can't dig Gwangi and I finally figured out why: it's not just that I hate children in monster movies, especially the burdensome cliche'd Mexican kid, one peso senor, that all monster movies seem to think settings in Mexico, Italy, or Spain, Brazil or Portugal require; it's not just that all that sun-bleached scenery makes me depressed and thirsty, it's because there's this unconscious brutality on the part of these cowboys. They never doubt their right to hunt this poor little horse down for the public's amusement, and to grab the still surviving beasts of Gwangi's valley for public display thus proving the point that man destroys everything he touches all in the name of a measly profit. Harryhausen's famous for getting us to care about his monsters, but that can backfire, such as Twenty Million Miles to Earth which also has the tiresome one peso senor kid. And like that film, our abused creature here even has to battle another abused creature, in this case a circus elephant, also Harryhausen-animated. I have the same problem with Hatari! My top ten favorite movies of all time are at least 60% Hawks, but I can't abide that film's obliviously callous approach to abducting animals and the icky triumph of Red Buttons in getting the girl through methods most boys wisely abandon before they even get a first date. Hawks, you're sending the wrong message to the children... in this one film.

Big Ass Spider/s and deadly mantises however never manage to earn my sympathy, and for that I am truly grateful, a realization that prompts me to stop trying to love Gwangi and instead look over towards my disc of Jack Arnold's classic Tarantula (1955--above) like a man who finally realizes what matters in life, and who thinks like a spider in love... with Mara Corday.

(See also: I Like Big Bugs and I Cannot Lie)

Read More

Capsules d'Monstre: GHIDORAH, PHANTASM II, MANSTER, THE SMILING GHOST, KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS

GHIDORAH, THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER

1964 - dir. Ishiro Honda

****

I've seen a lot of Godzilla movies as a kid but I never... until lately. Man, GHIDORAH is the best one! Maybe it's Akira Ifukube's great, blowsy ominous-cool bassoon jazz score, which perfectly captures the drunken heaviness of these here monster giants as they stagger around and down volcanoes and bump into apartment complexes. Ifukube's cues repeat over and over but that's fine.  The dubbing is solid. The framing and colors are comic book perfection. Maybe it's because it ingeniously integrates a lot of fringe science elements. GHIDORAH: Number One!

It seems a bunch of scientists have been having nightly meetings with UFOs, so they invite a lady reporter to come check out how cool they are. When the UFOs don't come the night she's there, they accuse her of sending skeptical brainwaves out into the atmosphere and scaring the aliens off! Skeptical brainwaves! When the reporter dismisses the idea that brainwaves even exist, the scientists smile patronizingly. That's cool despite being sexist because it shows the easy way science can flip-flop on issues, condemning non-believers with an array of defense mechanisms, from witch burning to shows like Fact or Faked and Myth-busters. One day they sneer at the 'nuts' who believe UFOs exist; the next day they sneer at the 'cranks' who believe they don't. Look at the scientist's desk above and you see the way science might have matured had not events like Roswell been so effectively hushed up.

Anyway, later that night some hot princess of the mythical kingdom of Sergina (Akiko Wakabayashi) is abducted from her private plane by a UFO right before a terrorist bomb blows it to bits. The next day, scientists investigate a meteor that crashed in the mountains and left a huge Ghidorah egg. The princess appears at the dock, now possessed by a Martian (below) for a dockside press conference: "I come from the planet you call Mars! The earth--your planet-- is on the brink of destruction, and you refuse to take it seriously." They laugh. And the hatching egg is their reward. Look who's come all the way from space to show you that three heads are better than one, and that killing whales, dolphins, and Nanking is wrong! Ghidorah functions here as a kind of anti-global terrorist bomb, sent to wipe out violent civilizations before they can become a threat to the Galactic Federation (which is a real thing, according to my in-the-know informants!)

 

Of course, the glee with which Japan is wiped out time and again has become dampened by recent cataclysms, but can we doubt this scrappy dolphin-hating nation won't bounce back? So I got to go with Ghidorah on this one, even if those cute Mothra handler sisters are around to sing their little songs to get Godzilla and the latest incarnation of Mothra (still in caterpillar form) to unite against him. Then that Ifukube drunken bassoon score really stumbles into low, low gear, and the rumble atop the volcanic jungle is on.

 It's true, I used to root for the bad guys as a child watching Speed Racer; being a tot and inexperienced, I kept thinking "This time... this time they'll finally win." They never won! Like me, in kickball. Ghidorah, I want that Mach-5 crushed underfoot!

PHANTASM II 

1988 - dir. Don Coscarelli

***

Who knows where we go after we die? The Shadow and Don Coscarelli know, or at least dare to look in the same trans-dimensional direction as fringe theorists like David Icke and Nick Redfern. Like its predecessor, PHANTASM II deconstructs down to reveal what it's like to see the warped mysteries of humanity's archaic funeral rituals through the eyes of a young terrified child wandering the mausoleum while his parents cremate grandma, and being freaked out by the glint of the fading afternoon sun on the shiny marble walls, imagining a flying metal ball coming around looking for him, to drill out his pineal gland (the home of the soul) for use in bizarre fourth dimensional enslavement rites. Also, there's the ingenious STAR WARS-associative use of Jawa fashions for the tall man's undead ghost-dwarf minions.

Considering all the bizarre accoutrements of the funeral trade, you can imagine there being a hidden white room in the mortuary, where corpses are compacted for rebirth in a dimension where the gravity is much stronger, the colors morphed, and the winds relentless. The dimension when finally shown eerily resembles near-death experiences of the unlucky ones who miss the white light. Such people report their astral body/soul floating up to the white light and then being snatched by hands emerging from the dark shadows along the tunnel's sides, yanked into this prison of Hell, where untold despair is instilled and harvested as they march along a long trail through a desert-like plain led in front by a flying saucer that seems to be harvesting elements of their souls! Part Moses and Yaweh leading the Israelites through the wasteland, part literal hell.

Whoa, hey! Too much? Then just enjoy this low key TERMINATOR-meets-EVIL DEAD thrill ride movie, with its periodic in-jokes (the name on one bag of cremation ashes is "Sam Raimi") and pretend you're in a car at a crumbling drive-in in the early 1980s, the world alive with youth, health, and bravado... all of which about to shortly crumble down around you, like the drive-in itself, until all that's left are ashes in an urn and an undead dwarf in a brown robe, texting furiously.

THE MANSTER

1959 - dir. George P. Breakson

***

Here's something you don't see often: a black and white Japanese horror movie where all the actors speak English (i.e. they are not post-dubbed). Pretty awesome, as is the moody but economical but moody black and white photography and surplus of monsters. The story has the evil Dr. Suzuki (Tetsu Nakamara) and his hot assistant (Terri Zimmern) drugging (with experimental mutant-making serum) a dimwitted American journalist named Larry (Peter Dynely) then having Terri seduce him so that he'll stick around Japan and they can monitor him as he devolves. Adrift in the Tokyo bar scene, Larry starts drinking heavily, skulking around at night, killing random people, lusting for Terri, and avoiding his journalistic responsibilities.

Terri Zimmern

Dialogue is awesome in its directness; acting is okay; low-key B-movie expressionism rocks--as in the famous Dali-esque eyeball shoulder scene--and a Val Letwon-RKO kind of midnight ramble through a Zen Buddhist temple. So keenly rendered is the way the serum makes Larry into a hard-drinking, surly mess that I would recommend this movie to rehab centers. There's even some intervention-style drama with a clingy gaijin wife (Jayne Hilton) who wants Larry to come home and live a life of quiet desperation and he can't stand quiet desperation! As we say in AA, I really related.

THE SMILING GHOST

1941 - dir. Lewis Selier

**1/2

This all-nonsense studio B-picture concerns a layabout-for-hire (Wayne Morris) brought to a mysterious estate to marry an heiress (Alexis Smith) with a rep as 'the black widow' since her last three husbands died suspiciously. She wants to find out why, so marries our dimwit handyman hero as bait. Cue sheet metal thunder and secret panels! Meanwhile a spunky female reporter (Brenda Marshall) snoops around the bushes and an old uncle (Charles Halton) tries to add Willie Best's slack-jawed noggin to his shrunken head collection. I've seen some horribly racist caricatures of black people in old horror movies, but nothing quite like this! Willie Best even withholds vital information that could save lives because he's too busy overacting, as when he witnesses a secret passage open and shut and--even after armed good guys burst into the room moment later--all he can do is run away gibbering and bug-eyed instead of telling them where the panel is. It's almost enough to make you forget the rest of the movie's pretty good. It's not Best's fault but unlike Mantan Moreland's similar roles, there's no subversive actorly subtext (that I noticed anyway).

Brenda Marshall

Tiffany Bolling and friend

KINGDOM THE SPIDERS

1977 - dir. John "Bud" Cardos

***1/2

A loose remake of THE BIRDS, this spawn of the post-JAWS environ-amok genre stars William Shatner as a small town Arizona veterinarian and Tiffany Bolling as a big town etymologist sent in to help when toxicology on a dead calf reveals spider venom. Bolling's the Melanie Daniels; Marcy Lafferty (Shatner's real-life wife at the time) is the Annie Hayworth; the meet cute is at a gas station instead of a pet store, but there's still the holing up at the hotel bar with the cross section of the populace, and the big attack with people running around in panic with little creatures on them.

The Arizona scenery is beautiful with mesas like the ones in STAGECOACH. The worried black rancher (Woody Strode) fearful of losing his livestock in a quarantine-- "he worked for seven years to get that bull!"--is allowed much dignity and concern, so we're slowly climbing up the stereotypes from Best's cowardly manservant to over-serious humble sobriety... it's still a cliche, though, since he and his wife are the first humans to die. It's pretty dumb that the white folks decide to go on a picnic after finding the dead black couple lying in the grass covered with arachnid bites. Dumb, but typical.

But hey, you know this film is awesome when a tarantula--with scary library music cues filling the soundtrack--slowly climbs up onto Bolling's desk and into the open desk drawer while she's in the shower. When she finds it she just smiles like she's found a kitten, cradles it in her hand, then releases it outside. Tiffany Bolling, in other words, kicks ass! I love the way she towers over Shatner, and gently mocks him when he tries to seduce her, while still letting him continue to try. Her reputation amongst the Psychotronic set is well-deserved. I instantly ordered BONNIE'S KIDS after seeing this, and rented TRIANGLE (1970). Bill Shatner earns his cult, too, especially when he does an awesome high-stepping dance to not step on any of the spiders. He sometimes does step on them, but at least no hairpieces were harmed during the making of this movie.

Read More

Tony Curtis makes THE MANITOU (1978), Shire a PROPHECY (1979)

When I was growing up in the 70s,  back in Lansdale, PA, if I used my kid's telescope out my bedroom window on a dark clear night I could see the glow from the Montgomeryville Drive-In, down the hill, the bottom of the screen partially obstructed by tall fir trees. Without access to sound or any firm idea what was happening in each film, I nonetheless--or maybe because of--was spooked, especially by THE MANITOU, a film that promised via the newspaper reviews and TV ads: demons, shamans, Indian ghosts growing on shoulders, and people getting skinned alive!

I was also riveted by the commercials, ads, and reviews for PROPHECY, starring Talia Shire and more Native Americans. The crying PSA chief (left) on the litter-strewn highway was a cultural icon of the hour; conscientious adults still threw their fast food trash out their car window and left picnic grounds awash in litter. A single tear from a single Native American almost single-handedly changed that. Combine that single tear with the amok nature angle of JAWS and it all congeals into the late 1970s horror cinema landscape. White industrialists cut corners and end up mutating the wild life via mercury poisoning, the shaman sees it all, and shakes his rattle... the monsters come, like tears in rain...

Alas, every review I read at the time about either PROPHECY or THE MANITOU said they were pretty bad, and that's what kept me waiting all this time, over 30 years, to see them. It took the death of Tony Curtis to finally get my off my ass and into the cheap seats. Man, I'm glad I waited for digital widescreen, where the full glory shines through.

In MANITOU, Curtis plays a free-spirited Love Boat-style example of one of those semi-phony 'frisco spiritualists who've been fleecing gullible lonely Nob Hill widows since the days of Samuel Spade license number 596. Older perhaps, with a weird buzz cut, Curtis sports a cool robe and a hard-won devil-may-care demeanor. In fact if he had more hair and a K-Mart Scarface loungewear ensemble, he'd dress and cavort a lot like me. In fact, we both have ex-wives with growths in their backs that are slowly forming dwarf Native American medicine men coming back from a 400 year sleep to wreak havoc on the white man's world. And we both have cool stereo systems. And we dance with a hard-won sense of existential jubilation, the way Jean Paul Belmondo dances in PIERROT LE FOU.

As the plot matures, the western doctors try and cut off his ex-wife's growth. It fights back by making the doctor cut his own wrist instead. The doctors next try to use lasers, but the laser goes Star Wars nutso -- unfortunately beheading no one. Finally Curtis sends for a cool Native American medicine man, John Singing Rock (Michael Ansara, who underplays beautifully).

Now, maybe it was because my expectations were so rock bottom, but I really liked the laid-back edge of THE MANITOU. It's almost like an extended episode of Kolchak the Night Stalker. Most of all I dig the way there's remarkably little antagonism between the Native shaman and western medicinal cultures. You can tell in the above shot the suspicion and vague interest from the white doctor as he gives up the reigns of treatment to John Singing Rock. But it's a cool instance of flexibility and inter-cultural communication as western medicine must bow down and admit Native American magic knows more about the lands beyond beyond. As for the fiery climax, they'll have to work together, like Deepak Chopra, or a medicinal version of THE DEFIANT ONES. 

Giving the film some staunch method cred, Susan Strasberg (of PSYCH-OUT and THE TRIP/ daughter of Lee) plays the afflicted ex-wife, spending the bulk of the film in bed with an oxygen tube but returning in time to go topless for the finale, grinning like a maniac at the most inappropriate of times, and of course she rides the far-out visuals that PSYCH-OUT so sadly failed to deliver.

In other words, MANITOU is a low budget yet ambitious hack job that leans on Tony Curtis to carry it the way the Monogram horror films of the 1940s used to lean on Bela Lugosi. In both instances they made a good choice. Curtis plays it like an Italian working class Bob Hope in sufficiently serious CAT AND THE CANARY mode and carries the ball just as well as Darren McGavin in THE NIGHT STALKER, and that's no faint praise. 

PROPHECY is much better as far as photography and music, maybe even acting... but it's nowhere near the ditzy fun of MANITOUS, with its ALTERED STATES-cum-2001 hallucinations of one-eyed Godsquatches, lizard demons, STAR WARS-ish hand laser tag, a hospital room floating in outer space, Native American 'old' magic vs. medicine / machine age magic ("the typewriter has its own manitou!") all the way to decapitation and oh yes, the torn flesh of Strasberg's back (presumably) makes it looks like she's wearing a pink shower curtain liner. That's just fine with me.

PROPHECY meanwhile is too busy looking scared and preaching to remember if and when it should be scary or funny or anything else monster movies are supposed to be. Oscars are strove for in scenes involving pregnant Talia Shire listening to her EPA doctor husband express outrage at the poverty of the ghetto he visits early in the film, and then double outrage up in Vermont at the mercury leakage that's made tadpoles grow two feet long and an old medicine man go blind. So no, he doesn't want to bring a child into this fucked-up world! She hears all this while waiting to tell him the 'good' news of her pregnancy as he plays back his tape elaborating on all the horrible mutations that afflict fetuses subjected to mercury poisoned salmon, which of course they ate only the night before.This is a pretty great scene, full of unspoken dread and drama, but it drags on forever.

Supplying the Native American voice of crying-at-litter enviro-reason, Armand Assante smolders his way through a turn as the local 'Original People' chief. Rather than a real Native American he reminds us of , how you say? Ah yes. Antonio Banderas. In a good... way? Reminding us that method acting, somber mood and low key lighting reigned supreme in the 1970s, PROPHECY broods like it wants to be the method Coppola horror film of the era, reminding us even THE GODFATHER started out just another adaptation of a drugstore best seller.

So while THE MANITOU is gaudy like those great early Marvel monster comics, PROPHECY is more 70s gravitas, more the R-rated side, the GRIZZLY meets TAXI DRIVER side, the older kids side... with gloomy photography; children thrown and shattered against trees while still in their star-shaped sleeping bags; heads bitten off; some truly effective scenes of terrified humans waiting and listening in tunnels as the monster trashes the camp above, and detailed tours through the paper milling process at a factory downriver of an unseen Maine lumber camp.  However, after about the third self-righteous tantrum of our EPA doctor, and the endless caterwauling of the eventually forgotten mutant baby (not Shire's), you just want to press the button on all of humanity and get it over with.

Kind of uncertain about how to balance its interests, PROPHECY operates the way someone boring you with long-winded sermons at a bar suddenly remembers they're late for dinner and races out the door, forgetting their hat, gloves and coat and not even giving you time for rebuttal. Compared to the merry inconsistencies and everything-but-the kitchen sink Space Exorcist Rosemary Odyssey psychedelia nonchalance of THE MANITOU, PROPHECY's solemn messages about man's polluting the wilderness with his toxic runoff seems way too bleak. The monster crossing the lake scene, though, is damned awesome.

The difference between the two is like the difference between life in AA and life if you stay in the bar and wind up passed out underneath the stools. Do you want to clean up the mess of your polluted life, give the forest back to the Native Americans and ask the mountains for forgiveness? Or do you want to throw typewriters at dwarf medicine men and watch your ex-wife shoot lasers at giant space eyeballs?

I thought so.

Then again, you could do like I did, and not make a choice at all, make 'em a double (feature that is). Just remember to keep that nonjudgmental childhood telescope trained on the partially obstructed drive-in screen of bemused tolerance and low expectations. Sometimes sound, a clear view, and a full understanding of the plot can be downright detrimental.

Read More