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The Hand (1981)

September 13, 2013, 8:19 am
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Let's hear it for "The Hand", one of the best movies ever made about a crawling hand.  Well, no, let me rephrase that: what I meant to say was, "The Hand" kinda sucks.  It was 1981, the year of such other great horror movies as "The Howling", "An American Werewolf In London", "Evil Dead".  So, what the hell is "The Hand"'s problem?  Why couldn't it get with the program? 

Well, for one thing, it's hard to be a good movie when the movie's about a crawling hand.  It's just not really all that scary.  "Oh, there's a hand crawling on the ground?  Well that's really weird, step on it.  Or run over it with a lawn mower.  Or, just put a laundry basket over it and put a heavy book on top to hold it in place."  What damage can a crawling hand do?  In "The Hand", it not only crawls, but it seems to teleport right onto the necks of its victims.

Michael Caine is a cartoonist married to a woman who talks like one of the "NPR girls" from Saturday Night Live.  Their house in the country is getting on her urbane nerves, and she wants to take an apartment in New York City.  What she fails to tell him is that she intends to take her daughter and move there without him.  In what is possibly the movie's only truly effective scene, they're setting out for NYC to look at a potentially fabulous apartment to rent. NPR woman is driving, and she has an unfortunate case of road rage that results in an accident that severs Michael Caine's hand.  Blood everywhere!

At that point, the movie could probably end, because that's probably what you'll remember most after watching "The Hand".  Caine gets a prosthetic hand to replace the one that's currently rampaging through his life, but his days of cartooning are over.  He leaves town and takes a job teaching, meets a biker chick and begins an affair, makes a sleazy friend, and is stalked by his crawling disembodied hand. I think we're supposed to dread and/or anticipate the moments when the hand might appear and strangle somebody, but honestly it only happens a few times.  And get ready for some massive spoilage...I mean really, I'm going on a spoiling rampage here: it turns out that the hand didn't really do anything, it was really MICHAEL CAINE doing all the strangling.  Bet you didn't see that one coming, did you? You probably won't see the twist-twist ending coming, either, where the hand really does choke a doctor to death while Caine watches (Viveca Lindfors, who had a much more enjoyable cameo role in "Creepshow" the following year as dotty old Aunt Bedelia).

I'm not sure what Oliver Stone was going for with this one. I can't even speculate as to how much cocaine he was doing at the time, because "The Hand" isn't crazy enough to indicate anybody was having any fun at all. I admit, a crawling hand is a creepy idea, and they can be fun for a brief moment, like in "Evil Dead 2".  I remember a crawling hand in that all-time TV classic "The Eye Creatures", and that scared me when I was about 8.  Oh, and Christopher Lee fell prey to a severed hand in "The House That Dripped Blood".  But crawling hands aren't really scary enough to carry their own movies, and even though it is very talky, "The Hand" was definitely promoted as a horror movie. It got coverage in "Fangoria", I remember reading about it and seeing shots of the gruesome hand effects, both Michael Caine's bloody stump and the crawling demon itself. But ultimately, "The Hand" comes off just like its title villain: it's no big deal.
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I Dismember Mama (1972): Poor Albert and Little Annie

September 16, 2013, 1:47 pm
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"I Dismember Mama", aka "Poor Albert & Little Annie" (1972) has one of those notorious titles that I have always seen lurking on the outskirts of my awareness, on video shelves, in magazine articles, in catalogs...and all with no idea what kind of movie to which it was attached.  I decided to end this silly game that "I Dismember Mama" and I were playing with each other, and just walk right up and introduce myself. That was when "I Dismember Mama" turned around and whacked me up side of the head. I still haven't recovered.

Directed by Paul Leder, whose career I'm mostly unfamiliar with, "I Dismember Mama" is a low budget curiosity that is full of interesting photography, excellent performances by actors, and a memorably bizarre story. Although its cheapness shows through in almost every scene, it shows just as much art and inspiration as it does technical ineptitude and fragmented editing. If it hadn't featured such convincing performances by the leads, it never would have worked.
"Don't say that you love me, just tell me that you want me."
The first thing we see in the film is a man's face surrounded by darkness, next to a running film projector. The face belongs to Albert Robertson (Zooey Hall), who is currently in a mental hospital. A nurse comes in and interacts with him, gently scolding him with something like "Now Albert, you know you're not supposed to be watching these films..." and we assume these are what proper people refer to as "art films".  When she takes the film out of the projector, Albert goes from mildly irritated to violent in a split second, hurling the startled nurse onto a bed, ripping her clothes off and trying to strangle her. Orderlies intervene in the nick of time, but we immediately understand that Albert is screwed up like a soup sandwich, and appears to be in an institution ill-equipped to deal with him. Albert's doctor tells him Albert's there to deal with his feelings that "all women are whores," and he seems to fixate on his mother (Anne Marie Jordan) most of all. Albert has tried to knife her to death, and because of Albert's lack of remorse for his aberrant behavior, the doctor intends to send him to a state institution. See, Albert's mother is rich, and she has him in some private, low-security hospital, and Albert easily escapes by murdering an orderly.
"NO dear, don't take that Brady Bunch acting job, I'm warning you, it will kill your career."

From what we see of Mrs. Robertson, Albert had the right idea after all, as she seems like a self-absorbed snob. We see her talking down to her housekeeper, Alice (Marlene Tracy), and she blames Albert's outburst on his victim, the nurse, and she pooh-poohs the idea of sending Albert to an institution. She changes her tune though when Albert calls her and tells her he can hardly wait to see her. The police spirit her away to another house, but apparently it never occurs to them to put an officer at the main house. You know, the one Albert knows his mother lives in? When Albert shows up there later, he catches Alice packing her suitcase to leave.  In one of the movie's most disturbing scenes, he begins to torment Alice, threatening her with a knife for information about his mother, then ordering Alice to strip for him and perform a sexy dance. It's an intense scene, and one that both actors carry off expertly, especially Marlene Tracy. She's forced at knifepoint to strip and sing for Albert, and we can see in her eyes when Alice begins to realize Albert will certainly murder her. It's one of the most hair-raising things I've seen in a movie.

But the rest of the film is just as engrossing and disturbing. Alice's preteen daughter, Annie (Geri Reischel), comes home from school after Albert has killed her mother, and the dangerously disturbed Albert tells her that her mother had to go to the doctor because she was ill. After they hang out together for a while, Albert takes a liking to her and apparently decides not to kill her, instead spiriting her away on an idyllic day where they ride paddleboats and a small train. When Albert takes Annie to a hotel, his strange attraction to her starts to manifest itself. Instead of making a sexual advance toward Annie, Albert goes to a bar and picks up a woman there by flashing a little money around. We already know he's going to kill her, and Annie wakes up when it happens, escaping the hotel suite down the fire escape. Albert chases after her and pursues her in the film's climax, which finds them Annie lost in a strange, deserted back alley of the city. They wind up in a mannequin factory, where Annie tries to hide among the figures. Albert spots her though, and accuses her of being "just like all the others", attacking her with a convenient meat cleaver that just happens to by lying nearby. Annie, however, pushes a mannequin into him and he falls out a fourth story window onto the concrete.


"I Dismember Mama" actually doesn't feature any dismemberment, and eventually the mother is completely forgotten, so the title is nearly meaningless. This is probably one of the biggest problems that the movie has, since enough screen time is given to Albert's heartless mother that we start to care about whether or not he gets her, and we want him to. Although Albert is a compulsive murderer and rapist, we get the feeling that his mother is completely disassociated from reality, and she can't deal with the truth about Albert. There is also all sorts of ineptitude from the police, who aren't even coherent enough to guess that Albert might return home after escaping from the hospital. Even Albert's "doctor" is a shithead, openly defying the police investigation and refusing to tell Mrs. Robertson that Albert has killed her housekeeper.


"Lookin' out for looooove...."

But these unresolved plot threads are really superfluous anyway, since the film's centerpiece is Zooey Hall. His performance as Albert is as terrifying as David Hess from "Last House on the Left", but Hall endows the character with a likable side too, which really makes it upsetting when he lapses into his deranged behavior. The scene where he threatens Alice and makes her strip is really scary because he is so calm and collected during the whole thing, but his explosive violence in the other murders is just as scary. The terror of Albert is that he's obviously dangerously disturbed, yet he doesn't come up against anybody who can put him in check. The doctor he's assigned is unable to reach him, the hospital staff is unprepared to deal with him, and the victims he selects are seemingly unable to fight back against him. His interest in Annie, however, brings out a childlike side of himself, and it's hard not to feel pity for him when we see his momentary happiness. A lot of the tension, of course, depends on Annie being totally naive about the fact that she's in danger, not to mention that she is in the company of a man who apparently has pedophilic designs on her. After killing her mother, Albert takes her on a day of fun, then spends the night with her in a hotel, and in a bizarre sequence we see them conducting a mock wedding. Albert tells Annie that she's the only pure female he's ever known, uncorrupted by whatever issues he perceives about most women. In the hallucinatory chase through the mannequin factory at the end, surrounded by artificial female bodies in various stages of assembly, there's a moment when Albert finally spots her and sees her with cosmetics on, something we're never quite sure is real or not. This horrifies him and he immediately decides to kill Annie, using a meat cleaver that's conveniently lying nearby--in a mannequin factory! Only Annie's cleverness saves her; using a mannequin as a shield, she manages to push Albert out the window, the mannequin protecting her in the way an adult might protect a child from danger.


"I Dismember Mama" is extremely dated filmmaking, which either adds to or detracts from it, depending on the viewer. The glimpse into the social mores, design, clothes, decor, and attitudes of the 1970s is crucial to the experience, and there's even a ballad that plays over top of the montage where Albert and Annie have their fun day together. I loved one moment when a character was standing outside a hot dog shop that sold hot dogs for 19 cents. Viewers expecting gore will be disappointed, and with good reason in a film that was marketed until a title that features the word "dismember". There is a gory aftermath of a throat-slashing near the beginning, and a briefly glimpsed surface wound during a knife attack, but that's the extent. The original title is also misleading, though, and more than a little vague. I can't say that "I Dismember Mama" is a pleasant experience, but considering horror movies are meant to get under our skin, this one succeeded in spades with me. It is artfully disturbing and tastefully done, considering that it touches on themes of mental illness, sexual violence, and apparent pedophilia, and I won't forget it anytime soon.  Leder, who also was behind the awful 1976 giant monster spoof/ripoff movie "A*P*E", also made a sequel to "I Dismember Mama" in 1994 called "Killing Obsession", but as yet I haven't seen it, and I can't imagine how this doomy little movie could be improved upon. Forget the lack of gore; this is about as lurid, affecting, and engrossing that an exploitation film can get.





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Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973)

September 18, 2013, 9:29 pm
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Welcome to the wacky world of "Invasion of the Bee Girls", where certain honeys are more than they seem to bee, and even the very act of sexual intercourse can result in your death at the...hands?...of a woman mutated with the genetic material of bees. Hear me, true bee-lievers, it could happen to you just like it did in Peckham, California. Let me tell you all about it.

Neil Agar (William Smith, "Grave of the Vampire", "Maniac Cop") is a state agent investigating the death of a bacteriologist who was found dead in a cheap motel room. The scientist was associated with the Brandt Research center, a government-sponsored lab in the small town of Peckham, and his death seems to have been caused by a heart attack that occurred during a moment of sexual intercourse. His female partner is unknown. Before Agar can decide the death isn't suspicious after all, more bodies start turning up that look a lot like this:


It seems that Peckham has a strange epidemic on its hands, and the exclusively male victims all suffer the same symptoms: fatal thrombosis during sexual intercourse. Neil meets the Brandt center's chief librarian Julie Zorn (Victora Vetri, "Rosemary's Baby"), who tips him off about the important scientists working at Brandt. The sudden rash of deaths has the locals panicked, and by "locals" I should say stereotypically piggish semi-thugs who do things like sexually assault women in alleys, attend rabble-rousing union meetings and drink a lot of beer. The local sheriff holds a town meeting to warn everyone to be celibate, although the men are not about to put on any purity rings, and more of them wind up dead after coming into contact with several suspiciously beautiful women who like to wear large dark sunglasses. At night. Brandt's sex expert, Henry Murger, announces that he has a bizarre theory to explain the deaths, but he is conveniently run over by a car with a mysterious (and we presume beautiful) driver before he can meet with Neil and Julie to discuss his theory.
They also have this suspect honeycomb-vision, accompanied by a buzzing sound.
Your showcase contains this beautifully complicated instrument panel, essential for any world domination plot!
The figure who keeps appearing in the background at all these points of interest is Dr. Susan Harris (Anitra Ford), a lovely entomologist whom the horny male scientists describe as an 'iceberg'. It's not long into the movie where we start to realize women are deliberately and literally screwing these men to death, usually after they reveal that their eyes have turned completely black. This naturally never deters any of the men from screwing them, leading to this epidemic of sexually exhausted male corpses. Neil discovers that Murger, the one man not to succumb to this strange phenomenon, was gay and had a secret male lover. Could this bee the reason someone had to resort to the more patently boring method of vehicular homicide?
"Would you like some coffee with that sugar, Dr. Harris?"
Ha! Now my sunglasses are actually ON my EYEBALLS.
Another scientist named Herb Kline falls victim when Susan Harris suddenly warms up to him and invites him to her house for dinner, where she seduces him and then kills him with sex, her eyes turning black. SHOCK-she's ONE of them! Well, not only is she one of them, she's the creator of them! Harris has developed a way to transform ordinary women through a process of controlled mutation. After Kline is dead, she phones Mrs. Kline and lures her to her laboratory, where she has this strange hive-like dome equipped with what appear to be giant ray guns. Harris and the other "bee girls" force Mrs. Kline into their bee-o-dome (har har) and bombard her nude body with gamma rays, a gooey substance that looks suspiciously like marshmallow topping, and the final key ingredient: a swarm of irradiated bees. After her transformation is complete, her eyes are black too, and we presume she is now equipped with a killer bee-vagina like the others. Hvvvvvvvvvvvv....



So that's how it is in their hive....
Stay calm, sheriff...don't bother her and she won't bother you.
After Mrs. Kline becomes part of this insidious insect plot, the sheriff goes to inform her of her husband's death, at which point she attempts to seduce him right then and there while he's telling her about it. Perhaps only her bizarre sense of timing foils the plan by spooking the sheriff, who bolts. Proving that a bee girl is not invulnerable is another incident where Brandt geneticist Stan Williams is attacked by his recently transformed wife, but he manages to strangle her with her own stocking before he dies, resulting in one of the most bizarre crime scenes that any investigator has ever stumbled upon:
It's all about to come to an abrupt end for Dr. Harris and her bee girls, however, bee-cause super agent Neil is hot on their trail, assisted by the lovely librarian Julie. Neil connects all the dots in the nick of time and races back to Harris's lab, where Harris and her deadly women have kidnapped Julie and are attempting to turn her into one of them. Neil rescues Julie and fires a bullet into Harris's bee-machine, breaking it and saving the day. The bee girls die, and the mating process in Peckham can finally go back to normal.

Although it doesn't really work as a horror movie or even a science fiction film, "Invasion of the Bee Girls" is a true gem, a wild time capsule full of 1970s decor, politics, and attitudes. Like "The Stepford Wives" which came a few years after, this movie makes a dark satire about the power struggle between men and women of this era, seemingly stoking men's fears that women were gaining the upper hand and had malicious intent once they gained power. Anitra Ford is great as the film's female villain, although the script doesn't really bog down with too many details, ensuring that her character remains a cipher. The film is lacking a scene where she explains her motivation for doing what she's doing, leaving us to draw our own conclusions. The movie plays it safe by making both sides of the issue into caricatures; although the obligatory romance blossoms between Neil and Julie, when they first meet she gives him an unsmiling, hostile greeting. Dr. Harris herself is the very definition of a frigid bitch, warming up only when it's time to seduce a man and kill him. The men in the movie are almost all foolish boors--the local townspeople are even depicted as sexually aggressive and violent, and there's a scene where no less than four of them attempt to gang rape Julie. The Brandt scientists are not much better, despite being stuffy brainiac types. Even when men are dropping dead after having sex, they are rendered powerless by any woman who wears provocative clothes. I found it hilarious that the bee girls had to run over Murger with a car because he was gay and therefore immune to their seductive charms, but did the movie have to tell us this via a scene where Neil finds a secret sex room in Murger's house, full of whips, chains, crossdressing items, greek statues, caged birds, an aquarium, and...lava lamps? Who knew a blue lava lamp meant you were gay? Hey, I love lava lamps, so maybe it's true. Hmm!

Any high-tech laboratory is not complete without an ice cream cooler.
It's best not to think about these things too much though when you're watching a B movie (get it?), and my only real complaint with "Invasion of the Bee Girls" is the abrupt, lifeless conclusion. Despite being completely outnumbered by about 10 to 1, Neil is able to easily infiltrate Dr. Harris's lab--she doesn't even lock the door--when Julie is in danger of being transformed. Not only that, all he has to do is fire a single shot into the giant instrument panel and the ENTIRE HIVE is conveniently killed. Dr. Harris is one of the most fascinating characters in the movie, but we know so little about her. It's disappointing that when she's faced with the complete undoing of her evil scheme, she can't even muster up the strength to fight back. Considering she's a mad scientist, she could have at least had a scene where she proclaims her manifesto. Since her vendetta is against men, it would have been interesting to hear her views firsthand. But the worst indignity the movie heaps on her is her death scene. OK, I get it...she's a mad scientist. She wants to take over the world (or at least Peckham) by murdering all the men. She must be stopped, which in horror movies means she must die. But couldn't they have at least given her a spectacular death scene? Did she die when someone threw her into a bubbling cauldron of molten beeswax? Did she get accidentally sealed inside a honeycomb and asphyxiate? Was she burned alive while being embraced by the spirit of Joan of Arc? No, actually this happens:

She just sort of stands there in a daze while her bee-o-dome goes up on a flurry of sparks, and then she is engulfed by a bloom of white light (radiation?), after which she scratches her own face and collapses.


Not very fitting for a mad genius, I say. I liked Dr. Harris, even if she was a little more Valerie Solanis than Naomi Wolfe. 

"Invasion of the Bee Girls" doesn't have much in the way of horror, with the exception of the murder of Henry Murger, during which an unseen Harris drives a car into him and crushes his midsection, then while he is lying on the ground dying, violently crushes his entire body by running right over him. There are a lot of beautiful naked women of varying ages and body types, and if this movie had been made in 2013, there wouldn't be a bee girl over the age of 23 in the film. One of the sexiest women in the movie is Beverly Powers, who appeared as Beverly Hills in"Brides of Blood". Beverly was in her mid 30s when she made "Invasion of the Bee Girls", and her character is made to appear slightly older than that, but her seduction scene is one of the best in the film: earlier in the film we see her putting cold cream on her face while snapping at her husband before bedtime, and after being transformed she performs an erotic strip tease for him. Anitra Ford is an interesting lead as well, she has an exotic quality to her and her limited dialogue in the film makes her seem even more mysterious.

I really must have that mirror for my own. My life may depend on it.
Technically, "Invasion of the Bee Girls" is about what you'd expect for a cheap exploitation film from the 1970s. The film stock is often grainy, the editing sometimes rough, and there's nothing in the way of special effects that will make you say "Wow, man!" But the cinematography is endearingly 70s, with a lot of zooms and focus pulls. The decor is even more outrageously, wonderfully dated, as are the clothing and hairstyles of the male characters. The soundtrack is a lot of wakka-wakka funk, especially one piece that features frantic ethereal "bee girl" vocals that sound like a nightmarish B-side (bee side?) to the Three Degrees "When Will I See You Again".

Furthering my love for "Invasion of the Bee Girls" is the fact that it was re-released in the early 1980s as a double-bill second feature under the title "Graveyard Tramps". I can't imagine where the hell anybody came up with that title, as only one scene in the movie takes place in a graveyard and that's during a funeral--but I love it.



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Flesh For Frankenstein (1973), aka Andy Warhol's Frankenstein

September 23, 2013, 8:28 am
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Whenever I think of the most disturbing films I've ever seen, "Flesh For Frankenstein" (1973) has got to be near the top of the list. The concept of Frankenstein and his experiments is something that pop culture tends to gloss over; those cartoonishly square-headed green-skinned monsters we see at Halloween are so far removed from Mary Shelley's original creation that it's easy to forget the "monster" is a corpse, and not even an entire corpse. It's pieced together from numerous dead bodies, as if body parts could be interchangeable and human beings could be little more than elaborate dolls. Filmed in Serbia back to back with "Blood for Dracula" and utilizing many of the same cast members, "Flesh for Frankenstein" was marketed in the United States as "Andy Warhol's Frankenstein", just like its sibling was retitled "Andy Warhol's Dracula". Both films were directed by Paul Morrissey, veteran of the Warhol-produced films "Heat", "Trash", and "Flesh".  Like those films, "Frankenstein" and "Dracula" both feature Warhol personality Joe Dallesandro. While both films are identical in tone and style, only "Frankenstein" ended up being so over the top gory, nihilistic, and absolutely bizarre. It also has the distinction of being the only film of the two that was filmed in 3D. While it is technically a spoof of Frankenstein films, it is played straight and has a serious side that goes right alongside the ridiculous elements. It can be read both ways, often simultaneously.


"Ve vill find ze perfect...nasum."
The one and only Udo Kier stars as Baron Frankenstein, seemingly obsessed not only with the reanimation of dead bodies, but with the creation of a master Serbian race. Frankenstein lives in the family castle with a woman who appears to be his wife and the mother of his two children, who we see in the opening scene prowling Frankenstein's lab and dissecting a doll.  Later we come to realize that the Baroness is not only Frankenstein's wife, but also his sister. Whether or not the two are really the parents of the children is unclear, but incest is the least of the sexual perversions going on in the Frankenstein castle.  The Baroness (Monique van Mooren) suffers from her lack of a sex life with her "husband" and starts to set her sights on local stud peasant Nicholas (Joe Dallesandro), who is constantly found in sexual situations with various young maidens in the village. Aided by the required bizarre assistant Otto (Arno Juerging), the Baron presides over his two monsters in his laboratory. Before bringing them to life, he removes the female zombie from its holding tank and cuts it open, fondling its insides in an orgasmic way, then having sex with it, after which he delivers one of the movie's most unforgettable lines: "To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life in the gall bladder!"


Frankenstein is determined to find the ideal head for his male monster, one that has the perfect Serbian nose (referred to here as a "nasum"). The Baron and Otto find the right head on local peasant Sacha (Srdjan Zelenovic), a mild mannered man who has aspirations to become a monk.  The bawdy Nicholas is his friend and takes him to a whorehouse, but Sacha isn't interested in sex. The Baron and Otto don't know this, and wait for him to emerge with the now-drunken Nicholas. They knock Nicholas unconscious and decapitate Sacha then and there, the Baron holding his head triumphantly. Whatever Frankenstein's methods are, they're pretty amazing because they don't even pack it in ice. Little does he know that Sacha's disinterest in sex makes him an unlikely candidate as the father of a master race, and when he attaches the head to the male monster, everyone is disappointed when he fails to respond to the beautiful female creature.




Meanwhile, Nicholas seeks shelter at the castle after the locals find him next to Sacha's decapitated body and suspect him of murder. Flustered by his studliness, the icy Baroness takes him in and hires him to...tend to her stables, if you know what I mean. When the Baron decides to bring his two creations to the dinner table that night, Nicholas recognizes his former friend and begins to investigate, uncovering Frankenstein's experiments. The two children also are aware of the experiments, lurking in the hidden passageways of the castle and spying on their mother's and father's perverted sex lives. At one point they sneak into the laboratory and gaze silently at the horrors on display there, including a set of disembodied lungs and a heart, attached to wires and tubes and breathing on their own. Frankenstein  himself spies on the Baroness when she's with Nicholas, yet seems to be completely uninterested in her otherwise.



The Baron eventually loses control of the morbid situation he's set in motion. The dangerously disturbed Otto goes haywire with jealousy and sexual frustration, first by attacking the castle maid and killing her when he attempts to fondle her insides the way Frankenstein does to the female zombie. One of the film's weirdest scenes is when he chases her through the laboratory until he has her cornered. He attacks her in a sexual manner, and there is a loud ripping sound on the soundtrack of the film, then she falls over a grating, her internal organs falling out of her body and dangling in 3D at the camera.


Later, Otto attempts to do the same to the female zombie and destroys her in the process, too, infuriating the Baron to the point where he strangles Otto to death. Nicholas, whom the Baron has tied up and held captive in the laboratory, watches as the Baroness forces herself into the equation by demanding that her brother let her take the male monster back to her bedroom for his sexual services. The Baron reluctantly agrees, but the male creature possesses brute strength and crushes her during the sex act, her ribs and back cracking loudly as he kills her. The monster carries her back to the lab, where the Baron has just killed Otto. The Baron goes berserk at seeing his sister dead, and orders the monster to kill Nicholas. Instead it goes after Frankenstein himself, leading to the Grand Guignol bloodbath finale: the monster shears off Frankenstein's hand with an iron gate door. After the Baron sprays blood all over the lab, the creature impales him with a spiked pole, the Baron's liver dangling off the end of it as it's thrust into the camera. The Baron delivers (de-livers?) a hilariously long dying speech, then expires in a kneeling position. Nicholas asks the creature to free him, but instead it commits suicide by ripping its own guts out, preferring to die rather than go on living. With the rest of the cast dead, the film ends as the children enter the lab and regard Nicholas curiously, then make preparations to re-enact the opening dissection, this time using Nicholas instead of the doll.

No mad scientist's lab is complete without one of these.
The movie has a strong atmosphere of doom and horror, even without the fantastic gore, but the gore is a large part of the movie's experience. Never has the true horror of Frankenstein's bodily invasions been so explicitly portrayed in a movie. Although the Hammer "Frankenstein" films came close, none of them paired their gore with such a strong sense of sexuality, and none of them would have dared tackle such pervasive themes of both necrophilia and incest. The actual sex scenes in the film are not pornographic, although the overall tone is way stronger than a typical R rated film. They're also a little unusual, shall we say, and more than a little ridiculous, like when the Baroness ecstatically licks Nicholas's armpit. While there is a lot of female nudity, Dallesandro also appears full frontal in the film, which even in 2013 still seems to push the envelope of what is and isn't acceptable in onscreen sex scenes. Indeed, "Andy Warhol's Frankenstein" was shown in the US with an "X" rating upon its release, and I'd advise against watching the edited R-rated version that circulates (the version on Netflix is listed as unrated, but is actually the R rated cut that removes most of the gore and sex scenes by either cutting them out entirely or destroying the film composition by zooming awkwardly onto less-offensive parts of the frame). The nudity and graphic violence are very much essential to the movie's effect.


Something seems to be wrong down there...
Although the movie is clearly not meant to be taken seriously, it's also hard not to get drawn into its strange world, which has a lot to do with the quality of the production. The sets are truly amazing, especially Frankenstein's lab, a nightmarish space containing antiquated tile, stone, and of course the essential mad scientist tubes and gadgets. The cinematography is engrossing and always artful, capturing the visual details of the sets and outlining their depth and character. The presence of Joe Dallesandro seems completely nonsensical, since everything about the movie is European except for him and his displaced New York personality, complete with a strong Brooklyn accent. Udo Kier's overwrought performance as the Baron is both absurd and strangely compelling, such as the scene where he desperately tries to get the male zombie to become sexually aroused by the female, shrieking over and over to the female zombie "Kiss him! What are you waiting for, KISS HIM!" Kier plays Baron Frankenstein much like a caricature of Hitler, which seems logical considering he is a sociopath obsessed with creating a 'master race'.

Although Dallesandro's performance is typically wooden, he does have a presence that's hard to deny. Monique van Mooren hits all the right notes as the snobby Baroness, and she even has one of the film's best lines when Dallesandro tries to warn her she's in danger and she shouts at him "How dare you wake me up in the middle of the day when you know I have insomnia!" The children are especially creepy, as they are silent throughout the entire film and have no lines of dialogue. We see them learning the decadent ways of their parents, even spying on them from the secret passageways when they're having sex, and after the Shakespearean climax of the film they silently approach Nicholas with scalpels, suggesting that Frankenstein's bizarre experiments will continue. While on one hand "Flesh for Frankenstein" is completely absurd and even laughable (and the filmmakers do want you to laugh), its nightmarish world of bodily degradation and sexual excess starts to take on a life of its own.





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Horror Express (1972)

October 2, 2013, 1:41 pm
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If you watched scary movies on TV in the 70s and early 80s, "Horror Express" was inescapable--if you don't recognize the title, you probably thought of it the same way I did, as "that movie with the white eyes bleeding from the head". I always caught it late at night, long after I should have been in bed, and it's one of those rare films that is just as good whether you're an adult or a kid. The plot finds two British men of science aboard the Trans Siberian Express fighting a shape shifting evil presence that one of them has freed from a cave during an expedition in Manchuria. The fact that the two leads are none other than Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing immediately gives "Horror Express" all the cred it would ever need, and even though it wasn't made by Hammer Films, the fact that they're in the movie makes it seem that way.
"Dude...I've been sleeping for a couple million years, what time is it?"

Professor Saxton (Christopher Lee) is an anthropologist who discovers what appears to be the fossilized remains of a prehistoric humanoid creature. With the creature's body packed in a crate, he boards the Trans-Siberian Express in China, along with fellow British scientist Dr. Wells (Peter Cushing). The two are rival colleagues, and Saxton is originally intent on keeping his discovery a secret until he can return to England. Before they even leave China, a local thief is found dead on the train platform next to the crate, his eyes bleeding and now completely white. A Polish Count and his wife encounter the scene while boarding, and their spiritual advisor, a crazed monk (Alberto de Mendoza), insists the contents of the crate are evil.  Wells becomes suspicious of Saxton's "fossil", and pays the baggage man to look inside the crate once everyone has boarded. When the man looks into the crate, the creature reanimates and kills him with its glowing red eye, which causes the man's eyes to go white. The creature then picks the lock and escapes, hiding on the train and claiming other passengers as victims, all of them found with white, bleeding eyes. Finally it is gunned down by a police inspector, Mirov (Julio Pena), but before it dies it locks eyes with him, somehow transferring itself to his own body.
"You call THIS vodka?"
Wells and his assistant perform an autopsy on one of the victims, deducing that the creature has drained its victims brains of all memories and knowledge. By extracting fluid from the dead fossil's eye, they are able to see images in the liquid that reveal a prehistoric Earth, as well as the planet as seen from space. The evil presence is an alien form of intelligent energy that is able to jump from body to body, and has survived on the planet for millions of years, transferring hosts until it became trapped in the body of the apelike creature that Saxton discovered. It is intent on absorbing enough knowledge to escape the planet and return to its own galaxy, with only Saxton and Wells in a position to stop it.
"Siberia..!? I thought we were headed for Ibiza!"
Most of the action in the film is contained to the cars of the train, which is pretty amazing when you realize that the filmmakers only had one train set that was redressed several times to simulate different cars. Legend has it that Cushing arrived on the set for this film mourning the recent death of his wife, and he informed the director that he couldn't do the film because he was too distraught. Christopher Lee intervened by simply reminiscing about old times with Cushing, who fortunately forgot all about quitting the picture and did the job after all. Just having the two of them together in the movie would have been enough, but we also get none other than Telly Savalas in a brief but juicy role as a Cossack officer who boards the train with a group of his men and roughs up the passengers in an attempt to find the "murderer"--of course his eyeballs end up like hard boiled eggs like all the other victims in the film. Another familiar face is Helga Line, who had an extensive film career in Spanish movies and appeared in several genre films, including "Vampire's Night Orgy". "Horror Express" doesn't have the budget of a Hammer film, but it's so efficient that you'd never know it. The exterior shots of the train are miniatures, but extremely well done miniatures. The glowing eyeball effects are excellent too, especially since they were probably very difficult to pull off in 1972.

An image harvested from fluid in the creature's eyeball reveals...a child's dinosaur book?
Alberto de Mendoza really steals the show as Pujardov, the mad monk whose character ends up taking center stage by the end of the film. Pujardov starts the movie by ominously warning the others that Saxton's crate contains "pure evil", melodramatically warning the others about the presence of "Satan". After it has migrated to Inspector Mirov's body, Pujardov becomes awed by it and offers to do its bidding. Instead it says to him "Fool, there's nothing worth taking in your brain." But when it is gunned down while using Mirov's body, the creature is forced to migrate into Pujardov anyway. Saxton himself declares earlier in the film that religion is superstition when one of the other characters refers to Darwin's Theory of Evolution as immoral, but at one point the creature confronts him and tempts him like the devil; faced with the fact that Saxton could kill it, it instead offers to teach him the secrets of science that it has absorbed over the millions of years it has survived. Both Saxton and the monk could be right about the creature, as it could both prove and disprove the human concept of Satan and evil in general. I love that this movie has such a great concept behind it, which makes it all the more interesting once the visual shocks are diluted by years of viewing.

"Horror Express" is definitely one of the greatest movies to feature Cushing and Lee, and they deliver a lot of the best lines as well. At one point Mirov (actually the creature) suggests that one of them could actually be the monster, to which a shocked Cushing responds "Monster? We're British, you know!" Telly Savalas is a total anachronism in this film and it's brilliant; he basically shows up, acts like Kojak for a few scenes, then turns into a white-eyed zombie. 

There are obvious parallels to "The Thing", or more specifically "Who Goes There?", the short story that inspired "The Thing", but the script is original enough that it stands on its own. The wackiest scene is when Cushing and Lee examine the liquid contents of the creature's eyeball and find that they can see images of the things the creature has seen in its lifetime, including dinosaurs (which are textbook illustrations). "Horror Express" is completely dubbed and was almost surely shot silent, with the entire audio track created in post-production. The result is a claustrophobic sound design that really enhances the atmosphere of a cramped, moving train. The gory elements are very effective, too, like one scene where Cushing uses a nasty looking saw to cut open the head of the dead porter's corpse during the autopsy. Those bleeding eyes, though...those will stick with you. I remember the sick feeling it used to give me when I watched it as a kid, with a combination of dread, excitement, and mystery.



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April Ghouls 2014 roundup!

April 27, 2014, 11:04 pm
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I don't know how you spent your weekend, but I spent mine staying up all night watching movies with a bunch of fellow horror geeks at the second annual April Ghouls Drive-In Monsterama at the Riverside Drive-In in Vandergrift, PA. This year's lineup was extremely inspired and classic, with classics like "Carrie" and "Suspiria" to lower budget films like "The Beast Within" and "Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things".

Friday night's lineup began with "The Town That Dreaded Sundown", a 1976 flick that's about as "drive-in exploitation" as you can possibly get, even though it was easily the most expendable movie on the program. It seems to have been made to entertain distracted drive-in patrons who were partying in their cars and not paying much attention, as the faux documentary format of the film really drags. The movie is really nothing more than a series of murder scenes strung together by snore-inducing investigative scenes, although the presence of Andrew Prine ("Grizzly", "Hannah, Queen of the Vampires") helps liven the interest for a while. The movie also features a memorable image of its killer, who wears a white cloth sack over his head much like Jason Voorhees did years later in "Friday the 13th Part 2".

Another 1976 film followed, one that is a little more well-known and widely seen: Brian DePalma's "Carrie". I never was a huge fan of this movie, despite the fact that it seems to be so beloved as an iconic horror film, but it played great on this bill and I admired it a little more for its excellent pacing. "Carrie" never lags for too long, especially considering the movie that came before it. Also, camp is king in "Carrie", from Piper Laurie's almost comedic turn as Carrie's zealot mother to the almost ridiculous interaction between John Travolta and Nancy Allen as the film's villainous teenagers. It's an abbreviated take on Stephen King's novel, and definitely not DePalma's best film, but it's pretty good for what it is.

"Suspiria" came third, and this movie never disappoints me when I see it on a big screen. I wasn't even bitter about the fact that our print was the standard US version, with the worst violence snipped out of it and an entire subplot removed--most scenes with the blind piano player Daniel have been removed, making the reason for his death an even greater mystery to anybody who has never seen the uncut film.  However, the cuts are not fatal to the movie, as Argento's stunning vision still showed through.

The final Friday flick was Wes Craven's original 1977 "The Hills Have Eyes", which has a little more plot than his debut "Last House on the Left", but retains that earlier film's confrontational approach to its violence. I dare anybody to have a problem with any movie that features Dee Wallace! I just dare you. OK, wait, she was in Rob Zombie's "Halloween", so it's OK if you have a problem with that one.

Speaking of "Halloween", the one and only 1978 original was the lead-off film on Saturday night's program, and although I've seen it in a theater a number of times, seeing it at the drive-in seemed almost too perfect. After all, drive-ins were undoubtedly important to that movie's original success in 1978, as they were still a large part of the moviegoing experience, especially among young people. Like everyone else on the planet, I know the movie inside out by this time, but the older I get, the more I notice how young Jamie Lee Curtis was when she made this big screen debut as babysitting warrior Laurie Strode. 

It had been a good while since the last time I saw 1982's "The Beast Within", a film I remember mostly because of all the coverage it got in Fangoria and Famous Monsters. When I finally saw it on HBO a few years after its theatrical release, I remember thinking it was awful. Indeed, it's a low budget experience, and the much-heralded special effects are now extremely dated. However, in spite of a few shots that don't work (such as a really fake-looking dummy shot involving a startlingly long tongue), the monster FX in "Beast" are actually pretty effective. The unpleasant story involves a teenager who is transforming into a hideous creature due to his unfortunate lineage, and it gets right to the action, not even giving us any images of Michael before shit starts to go haywire with him. A little like his counterpart Carrie, Michael finds that adolescence is a scary time when you can easily be embarrassed in front of girls--especially when you're turning into a cicada monster.

Yet another scary parable for those difficult teenage years, "Phantasm" is one of those movies that really makes no sense the first time you see it, with a plot as bizarre and random as anything you're likely to see. Told from the point of view of a young teenage boy whose close family members are all being taken from him in death, the movie is almost European in the way it asks you to draw your own conclusions about what is actually happening on screen at any given moment. The movie is literally a nightmare, with dreamlike plotting and elliptical pacing, but somehow the film successfully brings together outlandish elements of interdimensional travel, zombie dwarf slaves, teleportation, brain-draining silver sentry spheres, and shape-shifting creatures. Angus Scrimm is, of course, unforgettable as the movie's villain The Tall Man, and director Don Coscarelli fills the movie with bizarre images that are somehow never too ambitious for the movie's obviously tiny budget.

The crowning jewel of this year's April Ghouls was "Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things", a film I'd never seen on a big screen before, and there couldn't have been a better choice for the final movie. "Children" began around 3:15am, and although I've ranted about my deep love for this film before, suffice it to say that this movie's cheap and effective thrills looked even more cheap and effective at a misty late night drive in theater. Ask around, and you'll find that this movie's fans are wild about the scene where an entire cemetery full of rotting corpses comes alive with activity, zombies being ejected from the ground in a fantastic sequence that seems almost like ballet at times. Although any movie where dead people come back to life is asking a lot for your suspension of disbelief, "Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things" rewards you for your efforts with tons of cartoonishly grisly zombies. And while the film's violence isn't as gory or explicit as many other flicks in the genre, it's got some indelible images within its reels.

In between films, vintage exploitation trailers ran amok, and I saw so many classic drive-in films represented here I lost count. Some I recall are "Folks at Red Wolf Inn", "Dracula's Dog", "Embryo", "Futureworld", "Piranha", "The Car", "The Manitou", "The Sentinel", "Burnt Offerings", "Tentacles"...the list goes on and on. 

Sometimes it's hard to remember that there even was a time when we couldn't own films for viewing in our own homes whenever we wanted. We had to gather in places like a drive-in to experience them, and oftentimes it was impossible to see them again unless they came around a second time. Of course home video changed all that, and no film fan could resist the allure of being able to see your favorite films whenever you want. But when we gained that possibility, we lost a little of the magic, too. I can't say enough about how much I love these yearly events, and how lucky I feel that I don't have to drive too far to get there, as some patrons drive hundreds of miles to take part in the kind of time travel the Monsterama festivals represent. The love I have for a lot of these films doesn't come entirely from my enjoyment of the films themselves--if this was the only reason, a lot of us wouldn't be so compelled to watch these movies over and over like we do. Equally important is the cultural reference these movies represent for us. When I see them at the drive-in like this, it takes me back to where my love for horror films came from in the first place: my own youth, and a time when it seemed like this kind of imagination and creativity would just go on and on. 
















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Farewell to H.R. Giger.

May 13, 2014, 11:00 am
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"My paintings seem to make the strongest impression on people who are, well, who are crazy. A good many people think as I do. If they like my work they are creative...or they are crazy."
                                                                                                   
                                                                                       - H.R. Giger, 1979


Giger's dark legacy can't be overestimated. Although his most well-known accomplishment was his crucial art design in 1979's "ALIEN", his lengthy career as a multimedia artist was so much more than just that. His bizarre, beautiful, disturbing genius will be missed.











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Marilyn Burns (1950-2014)

August 5, 2014, 8:54 pm
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I will never forget the way Marilyn Burns drew me into the terrifying heart of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre". After obsessing over it for years--a 1981 re-release played local theaters and no sensible adult would take an 11-year-old me to see it--I watched it alone in the late 1980s on VHS. I wasn't prepared for how the movie made me feel. It unsettled me in a way I had never experienced up to that point. As a kid, I had seen "Halloween" on TV in 1979, and "ALIEN" the year after. Somewhere in there I had also seen "Night of the Living Dead". All of those films stuck with me because of the way they shocked me, but "Texas Chain Saw Massacre" was so brutal to me, it truly shook me and upset me.

It took me a long time to realize that the reason the movie works so well is because of how Marilyn Burns connects with the audience. The rest of the movie is brilliant, but her performance is so crucial that if she hadn't risen to the occasion, the movie might not have been as great. She's in a sustained state of absolute terror in the final third of the film, and she just does not let up for one second. The movie works so well because it looks so real, and she seemed like a real person pushed to the brink of anything she had ever experienced in her life. It blew my fucking mind.

Somewhere in the 80s, slasher movies had become totally boring and passe. A lot of them had great effects, or an interesting gimmick, but I usually compared their final girls to Jamie Lee Curtis. When I see them now, I realize what most of the lesser films really needed was a performance on the level of Marilyn Burns.
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Lisa and the Devil vs. The House of Exorcism

September 5, 2014, 10:36 am
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With "The House of Exorcism" featured as part of the lineup at next week's Drive-In Super MonsterRama, I thought this was a perfect excuse to gush about one of Mario Bava's most surreal works. If you're a huge Bava fan, or even just a TV junkie who watched a lot of cable movie reruns in the 1980s, you will probably already know this story, but in case you don't then read on.



"The House of Exorcism" began it's toad-vomiting celluloid life as another movie entirely. After a string of movies that did not do well at the box office, Mario Bava delivered a worldwide hit with the movie "Baron Blood", and producer Alfred Leone agreed to give Bava the money to finally make a project he'd been wanting to make for years called "Lisa and the Devil". Shot in 1973 with such notable acting talent as Elke Sommer ("Baron Blood"), Alida Valli ("Suspiria", "Inferno"), and Telly Savalas ("Horror Express"), "Lisa and the Devil" is one of Bava's most indulgent films, a dreamlike narrative full of cryptic moments that are never fully explained but which have an unsettling effect on the viewer. Sommer plays Lisa, a young tourist who becomes separated from the rest of her traveling party and finds herself alone in an unfamiliar city, where she has a bizarre encounter with a man who seems to mistake her for someone else. When he becomes aggressive, she pushes him and he falls down a long flight of stone stairs, apparently dead. Now convinced she has killed someone, Lisa runs off to find help in the apparently deserted city. When she finally finds other people, she's picked up by a married couple and their chauffeur, but after the car breaks down, they're forced to seek shelter in a nearby mansion. The mansion is inhabited by a Countess (Alida Valli) and her weird son Max (Alessio Orano), who is immediately smitten with Lisa and begs the group to stay the night. Overseeing everything is Leandro (Telly Savalas), the unflappable butler of the mansion, who just happens to resemble the fresco Lisa saw in the village square depicting the Devil carrying souls to the underworld. Nothing good comes of this arrangement.
"I refuse to speak of disgusting things, because they disgust me!"

"Lisa and the Devil" is a visual experience where the plot makes little obvious sense. There are recurring themes of mistaken identity, reincarnation, and characters who reappear as either corpses or mannequins, but the script never really states anything explicitly. There are several gruesome moments, but it's fair to say that "Lisa and the Devil" is a slow burn that never blazes. 

"Tell me the truth, does this hat make me look fat?"

"Mein gott, zis ees not Peck and Peck!"

Maybe that's why, when Bava finished the film and offered it to film distributors, nobody wanted it. With no companies interested in releasing the movie, it sat on the shelf until 1975, when Alfred Leone got the idea to try and recoup the film's costs by recutting it and creating an "Exorcist" cash-in, inserting newly filmed footage of Elke Sommer possessed and Robert Alda as an attending priest who attempts to exorcise Lisa's demon. Bava understandably at first refused to cut apart his Mona Lisa, and also objected to the content of the possession scenes, but eventually he got on board after Leone decided to direct the new scenes himself. The finished product, "The House of Exorcism", played American cinemas and drive-ins beginning in the summer of 1976. Although the new version was marketable due to its trendy possession theme, the new scenes with Elke Sommer shrieking in demonic ecstasy and spewing green bile are ridiculous, to say the least, and what we're really seeing is a series of over the top camp moments spliced into an art film. It does give the film a more concrete plot due to the constant narration as the demon speaks to Robert Alda and provides exposition, but it's ultimately meaningless. The arty qualities of "Lisa" never coalesce with the trashy puke-gasm that the possession scenes are obliged to give, so "The House of Exorcism" is one of the most schizophrenic movies you're likely to see in your lifetime. This in itself is a reason to be thrilled about it, not to mention the fact that the gorgeous Elke Sommer seems so committed to her character that she allowed herself to be made ugly for this trashy piece of exploitative filth. It's almost like performance art.

"Tell me your name!"
"I am known as Purloin!"
Fortunately, both versions of the film have remained in circulation for years, "Lisa and the Devil" playing on television frequently in the 70s and 80s and "The House of Exorcism" of course making the rounds in theaters in 1976 (and probably as the second or third feature at drive-ins for the remainder of the decade). IMDB claims that the original cut of "Lisa" premiered on television in 1983, but I distinctly remember watching it on TV late at night years before that, probably around 1977. The film made a deep impression on me, despite the fact that I had no idea what was going on, but I was caught up in its otherworldly atmosphere. "Lisa and the Devil" was the first Mario Bava film I saw, and actually may have been the first Italian horror film I ever saw as well. I remember being haunted by the eerie theme music, and also the bizarre ending of the film ("The House of Exorcism" unforgivably cuts the original ending and substitutes an obligatory but ultimately pointless scene where the priest performs an exorcism, not on Elke Sommer but on the house that contains the evil spirit haunting her). Even though "The House of Exorcism" is a grotesque mutilation of "Lisa and the Devil", you can still see a lot of the original beauty in this cut of the film, because Bava's outstanding cinematography is always present. Plus it's just really fun.







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The Boogey Man (1980) and Boogeyman II (1983): Death By Common Household Items.

September 9, 2014, 3:59 pm
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In late 1980 came a piece of low-low-budget filmmaking called "The Boogey Man", directed by German director Ulli Lommel. Although technically the story bears only passing resemblance to John Carpenter's "Halloween", the ominous TV spots and trailers teased the film as being related to "Halloween" without ever really saying so, picking out the moments in the film that matched Carpenter's film visually and thematically (a child's hand wielding a kitchen knife, an ordinary looking house lit in a spooky nighttime blue, a young female protagonist being chased and pounding on the front door of a house to be let in) and repeatedly intoning "The Boogey Man!". The tag line also suggests that The Boogey Man has "returned", as if the movie is a continuation of something we're already familiar with.



A'la Rob Zombie, Lommel liked to make films featuring his wife, and "The Boogey Man" gives Suzanna Love a starring role. She plays Lacey, the primary chica-in-trouble who finds herself victimized by what appears to be a very pissed off Invisible Man. In the film's opening sequence, two young children (Lacey and her brother Willy) are traumatized when their mother allows her creepy boyfriend to tie Willy to the bed and torture him after the kids are busted peeking at them through a window. You know, while the couple is being all sexy together (and stuff). Their slutting around involves the boyfriend wearing a stocking over his head, making him extra creepy. Lacey goes and gets a large kitchen knife to cut the ropes binding her brother to the bed, and Willy uses the knife to stab the creepy boyfriend to death. Lacey witnesses the act in a mirror in their mother's bedroom.

Because it's hot to wear pantyhose over your head, right? It just is.
Stab stab stab stab stab!
Flash forward many years to when Lacey and Willy are adults living with their aunt and uncle on a farm. Lacey is now married to a slightly dim bulb named Jake, who decides that the thing to cure Lacey's persistent nightmares is to take her to the house where the murder took place years ago. When they get there, they discover that the current owners have it for sale, so they pretend they're house shopping in order to get a good look around. Despite the fact that the house has supposedly just gone on the market, the homeowners have gone out of town and left their teenage daughters and preteen son in charge of showing strangers around their home. Not exactly parents of the year, are they?

Lacey goes all mental when she enters the room where the murder happened. The mirror is still there, hanging on the wall in the exact location her mother had it, and Lacey sees the image of the creepy boyfriend lying on the bed looking at her. Despite the fact that she's in a stranger's home, she picks up a chair and smashes the mirror to pieces, causing everyone to come running. Her husband does the sensible thing, which is to pick up every single tiny shard of the mirror, put it in a bag, and bring it back to the aunt and uncle's farm, where he painstakingly reassembles it. Well OK actually that is not the sensible thing, nor is it what a normal person would do in a situation like that, but if it were not so, then there would be no movie. The broken mirror has released the murderous spirit of the dead lover, who is free to cause murder and mayhem anywhere a shard of the mirror exists. But uh oh, remember that teenage sister and her little brother back at the original house? A small forgotten mirror shard that Jake left behind begins to glow with a red light, and a telekinetic force animates a pair of scissors to slash the teenage girls to death and crush their little brother to death in a window. The Boogey Man is loose!

Death by window is so undignified.

Killer shard.

Yes, "The Boogey Man" is about an invisible killer causing harmful things to float through the air and go after the human beings in the movie. The fact that the Boogey Man is invisible never really seems to deter the script from trying for some elaborate set pieces, with no real villain to focus on. Each attack scene features an ominous heart beating and Michael Myers-style breathing, usually over a point-of-view shot. Other times we just see levitating objects, like knives and pitchforks, ready to stab somebody real good. The convenient placement of broken mirror shards allows the Boogey Man to do his thing, such as when Lacey takes her young son fishing and he unknowingly has a piece of the mirror stuck to the bottom of his shoe. The mirror reflects light across the lake to where two couples are having a beachfront weenie roast, and the Boogey Man stabs a guy through the back of the head. Or rather, a knife floats into the back of a guy's head while he's sitting in his car. In a moment of true inspiration, his girlfriend leans into the car, not realizing he's dead, and when she leans in for a kiss, she's invisibly shoved onto the knife blade too, which is now sticking out of his mouth. Unfortunately for the Boogey Man, the other couple leaves because they think their friends are sitting in the car making out.

Behold, John Carradine!
There's also some riffing on "The Amityville Horror", as Lacey's farm house home happens to have those weird Amityville attic windows that look like eyes, and there's also a Rod Steiger lookalike priest who tries to exorcise The Boogey Man with a big crucifix. John Carradine also makes an appearance as Lacey's shrink, confirming my lifelong suspicion that actors need money just like the rest of us. The whole thing is accompanied by a shrill, squelchy synth soundtrack that is reminiscent of John Carpenter's score to "Halloween III" (which actually came later than this). It makes the spooky atmosphere especially cheesy, but that's not really a bad thing in this movie. "The Boogey Man" is ultra low budget and sketchy, but it's an interesting idea for an exploitation flick.

Don't it make my shard eye blue?
It also made a lot of money. The movie cost an estimated $300,000 to make, and it grossed 4.5 million in the USA alone, with a worldwide take of about $35,000,000. Surely its status as a legendary banned Video Nasty in the UK only made people want to see the film more, and the lucrative business it did ensured that there would be a sequel.



"Boogeyman II", aka "Revenge of the Boogey Man", was filmed in 1981 but not released until 1983, and where the original film got away with some crazy shit, this sequel sinks faster than if they'd tied a cinderblock to its ankles and dumped it in the ocean. According to IMDB, Paramount was interested in making this sequel, but instead Ulli Lommel decided to film it independently at his own house. Suzanna Love plays Lacey again, because ya know, she's married to Ulli Lommel, and there's also a second writer/director in Bruce Pearn (aka Bruce Starr). Ulli Lommel himself co-stars in "Boogeyman II" as a sleazy Hollywood type who wants to make a movie about Lacey's experiences in the first film. How Lacey got hooked up with a sleazy Hollywood type in the first place isn't exactly clear, but the main concept is that she's visiting Hollywood to discuss the details of her paranormal slasher experiences.

She doesn't really want to be in this movie, you can just tell.
What I was not prepared for was the fact that almost two thirds of the running time of "Boogeyman II" consists of flashback footage to "The Boogey Man." And when I say two thirds, I really mean two thirds. It's possible that I nodded off into a hypnotic stupor, but I am pretty sure there was only about half an hour of original material in "Boogeyman II", and the rest of it was lengthy passages from the first film, so much so that you probably don't even have to watch the first film, you'd be better off watching "Boogeyman II" and then you'd get your double megadose of The Boogey Man all at once. Once the flashback footage is out of the way, there are some extraneous sleazy Hollywood types who are all are murdered by common objects floating through the air as if wielded by an invisible maniac. One death scene that got points at least for being ambitious is a set piece that takes place in a closed garage, where a man and woman are sitting in a car parked inside the garage. The man is killed when he hears a noise and stands up, his head and shoulders outside the open sun roof. He is yanked through the opening screaming, and the woman just sort of watches it and seems annoyed, then gets out of the car and starts calling for him inside the garage. While she's bent down looking for him under the car (?), a telekinetically-controlled ladder slaps her on the butt and knocks her forward so that her mouth is right on the tailpipe of the car. Death is instantaneous. Also make sure you don't miss the death by electric toothbrush and shaving cream.

Hey baby, don't bogart that tailpipe!
While it's nothing great, "The Boogey Man" is a notable drive-in exploitation flick and it has enough style and atmosphere that I would recommend it to anybody who's a fan of low budget horror films. There are a few gory shocks, including a character who is found impaled through the neck and pinned to the wall by a pitchfork. You know, something that we could KIND of relate to if we have a morbid imagination. "Boogeyman II" seems like an SCTV spoof with lengthy flashback scenes padding it out and halfheartedly tedious attempts at something original, and is only recommended if you have insomnia. Or possibly a shaving cream death wish.
"Godammit, why does everyone keep leaving their dirty dishes in the sink for me to do??!"

"But I don't FEEL sleazy...have you got any cocaine?"



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Drive-In Super Monster-Rama 2014!

September 11, 2014, 11:48 am
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And oh yeah, this is tomorrow night.  Hope to see some of you there, say hi!


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Drive-In Super Monster-Rama 2014 recap!

September 14, 2014, 10:13 pm
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Few things are as exciting for me as the annual drive-in festivals hosted at the Riverside Drive-In. Considering I talk to people there who make the drive from as far away as Canada, I feel lucky I only have to drive about 45 minutes to see a late-night horror festival full of the kind of movies I grew up watching, and that just don't get made anymore. If you were there, then why did you not buy me something from the snack bar? And if you were not there, then here's a rundown of all the classic exploitation-schlock-adventure-horror-fantasy shenanigans!

FRIDAY


Friday September 12th featured three films by Italian director Mario Bava, plus one classic "Exorcist" ripoff flick. The first movie to screen was "Kill Baby Kill" (1966), a definite high point in Bava's career. Full of signature Bava images, such as dramatic colored lighting effects and shadowy figures moving through brightly lit fog, "Kill Baby Kill" is a period piece set in a small Carpathian village haunted by the murderous ghost of a long-dead child. The gothic sets are stunning, especially a spooky villa inhabited by the dead child's grieving mother. At one point, the camera swirls round and round while characters are rushing up and down a spiral staircase, one of those beautiful and bizarre moments reminding you that you're watching a Bava movie.


"But I CAANT be your daughter, my name is Monica SHOOF-tun!"

Second was "Dr. Goldfoot on the Girl Bombs" (1966), a sequel to the previous year's "Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine". Starring Vincent Price and Fabian, it's a spy caper spoof that makes "Get Smart" look like something meaningful and intelligent. Price's character is a villain who carries out a vengeful plot to murder a series of Generals by using a small army of "girl bombs"--beautiful female robots who explode when they are kissed and embraced. It is a pretty strange film, with Price constantly breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to the audience, and...well, one of the sight gags in the movie is Price and his cronies escaping in a jet while the heroes chase him in a hot air balloon, which they use to fly up next to the plane, knock on the door, and gain entrance by pretending to be selling Fuller brushes. It was a strange choice for the Monster-Rama, but not entirely unwelcome, either. It was interesting the way Bava put his touch on the material, with a lot of cinematography that was immediately identifiable as his. Considering how different this film is compared to "Kill Baby Kill", it's curious that both were released the same year.



Probably the biggest deal for me on this particular program was "The House of Exorcism", a flick I've never seen on a big screen before. "Lisa and the Devil" is one of my favorite Bava films, a gorgeous nightmare of a movie, and "The House of Exorcism" is a garish splash of green bile all over Bava's Mona Lisa. Still, the film's strange history is interesting, and this cut of the film is definitely more appropriate for a drive-in festival than Bava's art house horror original. The barely-there plot introduces Lisa Reiner, a tourist whose body apparently becomes possessed, not by a demon but by a departed human spirit that trades places with her. It makes no sense, but it's a reason for Elke Sommer to spew green bile and swear words.






Finishing out Friday night was the original 1974 "Beyond the Door", directed by Ovidio Assonitis and his cinematographer, Roberto D'Ettorre Piazzoli. Originally, this slot was to be filled by Mario Bava's final 1977 film "Schock", which was released in the US and UK in 1979 as "Beyond the Door II", but a last minute change must have been necessary. "Beyond the Door" is a welcome addition to any drive-in festival though, a gloriously trashy example of exploitation filmmaking that kept the possession theme going for the evening. A blatant ripoff of "The Exorcist", "Beyond the Door" should really need no introduction to any fan of 70s horror--even if you've never seen it, you probably remember the pervasive spooky ad campaign with scary demon voices in it. Every time I watch "Beyond the Door", I wonder why Warner Brothers didn't sue its makers the way they sued the makers of "Abby", because even though the story isn't all that similar (and doesn't even feature an exorcism or an exorcist), it rips off the green bile, the rotating head, the levitation, the bedroom tantrums, all of it.




SATURDAY



Another strong lineup featured on Saturday, starting with two Hammer Dracula films, 1970's "Taste the Blood of Dracula" and 1972's "Dracula A.D. 1972". Interestingly enough, these two seemingly different movies both had the same setup: some errant disciple of Dracula resurrects the Count via a Satanic ritual, which begs the question, why are people who worship Satan interested in Dracula? Isn't that kind of like saying Dracula is better? "Taste the Blood of Dracula" has the more fascinating story, with a group of three seemingly upstanding men meeting in secret to indulge in evil pastimes, apparently of the sex and booze variety. When they get bored with this and start looking for more excitement, they hook up with a man who talks them into resurrecting Dracula. One interesting moment has one of the men attempting to stake his vampirized daughter, only to have her awaken and drive the stake through his own heart, aided by Dracula and pals of course. Stake revenge! "Taste the Blood of Dracula" is one of the more fascinating Hammer Dracula films, with gorgeous period costumes and sets and a unique story. "Dracula A.D. 1972", on the other hand, seems to usually be regarded as one of Hammer's more ridiculous entries in the series. Played straight, it features another latter-day Dracula disciple who calls himself Johnny Alucard (hmmmm...) using a group of swinging London kids to bring Dracula back to life. Luckily, Peter Cushing is in this one as a descendant of Dracula's nemesis Van Helsing, and Dracula is out to wreck his life by turning his granddaughter Jessica into a vampire. There's lots of silly dialogue ("Ghastly, horrible, obscene murder!"), but it doesn't all seem to be unintentional, especially the scene where Van Helsing has to draw a diagram to figure out that "ALUCARD" is "DRACULA" spelled backwards. Geez, hasn't he ever seen "Son of Dracula"??




Third on the list was 1970's "Trog", Joan Crawford's notorious final feature film. A British production directed by Freddie Francis, "Trog" finds Crawford in the right place at the right time when spelunkers discover a hidden cave containing a living ape-man that Crawford immediately identifies as the missing link. But never mind that, not only is the world unimpressed with the fact that a real caveman has been found alive somewhere, but the locals want it destroyed because it killed one of the spelunkers. Additionally, no greater authority shows up to claim Trog, and Joan gets to keep him in a cage in her lab, where she teaches him to do things like throw a ball, catch a ball, and play with dolls. Eventually the obligatory rampage occurs, which features a few grisly moments like when a butcher winds up impaled through the head with a meat hook after getting on Trog's bad side. "Trog" borrows an ape suit from Kubrick's "2001", as well as recycled stop-motion dinosaur footage by Ray Harryhausen and Willis O'Brien from Irwin Allen's 1956 film "The Animal World".



"Darling, when I say there should be Pepsi, I mean there should be Pepsi."


The fourth and final feature was "The House That Screamed" (1969), directed by Narciso Ibanez Serrador ("Who Can Kill A Child"). Definitely a slow burn, the story concerns a school for wayward girls helmed by headmistress Fourneau (Lilli Palmer), who abuses the girls who gets on her nerves and tries to keep her own teenage son away from them at the same time. The problem is, the girls seem to keep "running away", which is to say some unseen character is murdering them, but WHO? The film's shadowy cinematography didn't translate well to the drive-in screen and some of the scenes were hard to make out, but the movie is full of spooky atmosphere and little touches that reminded me of later films like "Suspiria" and "Black Christmas".

The weather was appropriately chilly, with some great mist creeping in right around 3am Saturday night, just when "The House That Screamed" started to play. This was another great year for the Drive-In Super Monster-Rama. Many thanks to George Reis of DVD Drive-In, the Riverside Drive-In Theater, and everybody who made the journey to be part of the audience...hope to see you in April for April Ghouls!



















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Warlock Moon (1973)

November 11, 2014, 10:55 am
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"Warlock Moon" is one of those rare surprises, a fantastic obscure flick from 1973 that I never ran across until a few days ago, when it burst into my life and demanded that I start adoring it immediately. It's one of those cheap films with that special inventiveness the best low budget movies from the 70s possess, with a crew of interesting actors, a sinister premise, and the perfect filming location at a rundown abandoned resort. Of all the recurring themes that were usually present in 70s horror and fantasy films, "Warlock Moon" manages to combine the growing fascination with cannibalism and psycho killers with the oh-so-70s fear of Satanism and cults. The film shares more than a few similarities to another favorite, "The Folks At Red Wolf Inn" (1972), as it also concerns a young female college student who is lured into a trap by a creepy group of cannibals, and both films reveal an America in the aftermath of the Manson murders, where the naive outlook of the contemporary youth left them vulnerable to exploitation and victimization by evil people doing their best to seem harmless. Unlike more realistic exploitation like "Last House On The Left", "Warlock Moon" includes elements of the occult.


Laurie Walters (best known for TV's "Eight Is Enough") is wonderful as college student Jenny, who is minding her own business one day on campus when she's approached by an eccentric, childlike young man named John (Joe Spano from "Hill Street Blues"). John pesters her for a date by inviting her on a picnic, driving her to a rural area where they find an eerie old rundown resort. They decide to explore it, and are surprised to find an old woman named Mrs. Abercrombi (Edna MacAfee) living there. She invites the young couple to visit, but when Jenny drinks the tea Mrs. Abercrombi gives her, she starts to feel a little woozy. When John and the old lady leave her alone for a few minutes, Jenny goes rummaging through Mrs. Abercrombi's drawers, where she finds some strange, out of place medical equipment designed to give injections. She also glimpses an unidentified, ghostly woman in a wedding gown.

Ghost Bride, just doin' her thing.

No!! Not the dreaded circle of the flared pants!

Despite the strange experience, Jenny agrees to meet John there another day, so that he can interview Mrs. Abercrombi for an article about the resort he'd like to pitch to the school newspaper. On this second visit, Jenny arrives before John and discovers that there is no sign of Mrs. Abercrombi or any of her belongings. It appears as if nobody has lived there for a long time. She is startled to meet a kindly old man hunting in the woods who tells her that the resort used to be a health spa that was closed down in the 1930s after the owners hosted a ball for their newly married daughter, who went missing just before the party. Proceeding without her, the guests later discovered that the bride had been murdered by the cook, who served her as the meal they had just eaten. The hunter also casually mentions that this cannibalistic cook was supposedly a woman (hmmmm...), but he considers the story simply folklore. When Jenny hears John's car horn honking for her, she leaves the hunter alone, who then promptly gets axe murdered by one of the crazy looking men we've seen lurking in the area.

Hey fellas, you each have a mighty fine ax.

"You crazy young people today, with your Led Zeppelin and your Charles Manson!"
When John appears, Jenny discovers that Mrs. Abercrombi and all her belongings have also returned, but John doesn't believe Jenny's story about the place being deserted moments before. After drinking some more of Mrs. Abercrombi's tea, Jenny feels woozy again (hmmmmm.....), then does some more unwise exploring. The voice of the ghostly bride leads her to a room where she finds what appears to be some kind of ritual altar. She is then confronted by the axe-murdering man (who now has a presumably axe-murdering companion with him). After a short chase through the spooky house, Jenny collapses and Mrs. Abercrombi and John find her. There are of course no signs of the men, but Mrs. Abercrombi says Jenny is not well and insists on them staying for dinner and, apparently, overnight. Things naturally go from bad to worse, as Mrs. Abercrombi and her accomplices have something planned for Jenny that will bring her studies at Berkley to an abrupt end.

This is the joy of horror movies, I suppose--we know there's trouble, and there seem to be flashing neon signs warning of trouble, yet the trusting young kids seem to ignore everything and just keep placing themselves in mortal danger. But "Warlock Moon" benefits from offbeat actors who make these characters interesting.  I was particularly excited about one scene between Joe Spano and Laurie Walters. While John and Jenny are exploring the resort some more, they find an empty swimming pool and walk down into it. John goes off on this wild tangent where he enacts a one-man scene from a horror movie where a monster threatens the heroine and is then killed by the hero, and the moment is playful and flirtatious, ending in a kiss between the two of them. After the kiss, John suddenly starts behaving in a menacing way toward Jenny, cornering her in the pool and making slashing movements at her with a large branch he's holding. Jenny is terrified until John breaks character and returns to his old self again. The camera operator is standing right there in the pool with a handheld camera, tracking the two actors in a series of lengthy shots, one of which carries on for at least a few minutes without a cut. It seems spontaneous and real, playing almost like live theater or improv.


"Dammit, this is the book with the hidden KEY. Where's the book with the hidden FLASK?"

"Wait, no, I asked if you had any eye drops..."
Another standout moment is a truly frightening scene where Jenny is chased by one of the axe-wielding villains. Finding the gun of the hunter she met earlier, she shoots him in self-defense inside the freezer, then crawls back out in shock. In a strange and eerie twist, she sees him crawling out after her before we do, cringing as he emerges slowly out of the dark room and latches onto her before dying. Director William Herbert shows great promise with this scene and so many others, it's a shame he never made another movie after this one. 

The similarities between this film and "The Folks At Red Wolf Inn" are perhaps unintentional, but notable just the same. Both involve a sweet, naive young woman lured into a threatening situation by people who want to kill her and eat her. Unlike later cannibalism efforts like "Texas Chain Saw Massacre", both movies place their heroines in harms way through elaborate subterfuge instead of just chance. In "Folks", protagonist Regina finds herself at an inn of cannibals because they've pretended she won a contest she never really entered. In "Warlock Moon", the cult tricks Jenny into coming to their reclusive location under the pretense of an idyllic date and a new romance, appealing to both her loneliness and her sense of adventure. Both movies also feature the obligatory "What's In The Big Freezer?" moment where the heroine discovers exactly what that delicious meat is she's been eating, and both position their cannibals as elderly people with a crew of varying ages helping them in this elaborate plot to acquire human victims--there's even a moment where the heroine realizes, belatedly, that the police are in on it, too.


But the scene that plays out with Laurie Walters and Joe Spano in the empty swimming pool is the one that stands out the most, similar in tone and design to the moment in "Folks" where John Neilson and Linda Gillen are sharing a romantic moment on the beach when all of a sudden madness intrudes and Neilson starts brutally beating a live shark against the beach while Gillen looks on, speechless and horrified. When Spano starts to go koo-koo, Laurie Walters reacts with similar confusion, panic and uncertainty--it's unsettling.

Also worth mentioning is Edna MacAfee, who plays Mrs. Abercrombi. She's not quite a non-actress like Edith Massey, or Rhea MacAdams from "Don't Look In The Basement", and she manages to appear both sweet and sinister, often in the same scene. There's a moment when Jenny spots her slipping drugs into her wine, and the way MacAfee reacts to being found out is priceless.


Whether intentional or otherwise, I spotted a few elements in "Warlock Moon" that seem to have inspired more contemporary directors as well. The overall concept, as well as the rhythm of the film's final act, is reminiscent of Ti West's "House Of The Devil", while the two glowering hillbilly axemen in the film seem like they walked straight out of a Rob Zombie movie.

Low budget movies were often made to fill the latter part of the bill at a theater or drive-in and they didn't really have to be any good, just as long as they were something that could be marketed and sold. Features like "Warlock Moon" and "Folks At Red Wolf Inn" are interesting because they clearly have a vision behind them. They aspire to a certain level of artistry that makes them appealing for more than just a few cheap shocks or scares, and both tell tales that are effective without any elaborate special effects. "Warlock Moon" is interesting because of the otherworldly atmosphere it contains, and how effective it is with telling its weird story about cannibal witches with axes.






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Seven 70's Cannibal flicks off the beaten path

January 21, 2015, 9:27 pm
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If horror movies sometimes reflect whatever we're paranoid about as a society at any given moment, the horror films of the 70s revealed that, along with the idea of getting possessed or attacked by a large fish with sharp teeth, we became fixated on the idea that someone somewhere would like to eat us. With "Night of the Living Dead", it was zombies that wanted to tear us apart and eat us, but could this really be considered cannibalism? Later films like "Cannibal Holocaust" gave us a heaping dose of xenophobia with our yum yums, with various people venturing into the wild jungle only to be tortured and eaten by the savage natives. A mindless corpse wanting to eat us is one thing, and you've got to expect cannibal tribes to come for you if you travel their hunting grounds, but there's something especially disturbing about cannibal tendencies hiding in plain sight. A distinct kind of cannibal film template started forming in the early 70s that treated the eating of human flesh in a disturbing, matter-of-fact way. If you haven't seen this genre's greatest offering, 1974's "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre", what the hell are you waiting for? There isn't much that can match that film's ferocious intensity and bleak depiction of victims dehumanized and treated as meat, but its theme of cannibals luring victims onto their dinner plates exists in a number of early films that came both before and after 1974 (and before 1977's widely-seen "The Hills Have Eyes"). Herein lies a collection of cannibalism flicks that are a little farther off the beaten path, in no particular order.

7. Warlock Moon (1973)
Also known as: "Bloody Spa"

Featured on Groovy Doom just a short while ago, this movie really took me by surprise. A low-low budget effort that nevertheless attains that elusive atmosphere that a horror movie aspires to, "Warlock Moon" tells the tale of a young female college student who finds herself fascinated by a mysterious abandoned resort that her new boyfriend brings her to for some exploring. After discovering a friendly but strange old woman seemingly living alone there, the girl slowly begins to realize that she's been selected to be served as a hearty meal for a cult of devil-worshipping cannibals. Piecing together some local folklore, she learns the cult is eager to recreate their perfect sacrifice, which was when they served a young bride's body to a horde of unsuspecting, hungry guests attending a banquet in her honor.


This movie strikes a unique chord by linking Satanism and cannibalism, bringing the iconic representation of a flesh-eating witch from a fairy tale into a modern environment where even a young college student could be menaced, and although the budget is very low, it's one of those worthwhile tradeoffs where the lack of money brings out great creativity in the filmmakers. There are also a number of well done scenes between the two leads, Laurie Walters and Joe Spano.



6. The Ghoul (1975)
Also known as: "Night Of The Ghoul"

Released in 1975 and helmed by veteran director Freddie Francis, "The Ghoul" is not one of the more celebrated British horror films of its era. This could be due to its lethargic pace and obscure premise. What it does have going for it is Peter Cushing, who plays a disgraced former priest living a secluded lifestyle in a mansion on the moors, seemingly with only a few servants. When a group of posh revelers take part in a drunken racing challenge, one car breaks down by Cushing's manse, its two occupants turned into victims. The young man is disposed of, while the lovely young woman winds up on the menu for the mansion's secret resident: Cushing's demented son, who apparently picked up a taste for human flesh while Cushing had his family in India with him doing missionary work. Although it's extremely slow moving, what we're really seeing is a British take on the then-burgeoning horror trope involving isolated cannibalistic clans. The weird cook in this film is an Indian woman who lives with the family and presumably prepares The Ghoul's unusual menu, which is a far out concept when you think about it. What a niche market cannibalistic chefs must commandeer.

"The Ghoul" is worthwhile more for what it doesn't show than for what it does, and you can believe me when I say it doesn't show a lot. It lacks the gore and sex that was in demand by 1975, and features some laughable not-so-special effects when The Ghoul finally stumbles out into the open at the end. He's revealed to be an ordinary looking guy with a shaved bald head and...a green lens filter over his face. Oh yeah, and he also has a traveling blurry spot that goes with him when he moves, although what they were trying to give the impression of with that I will never know. But "The Ghoul" has a fantastic feel to it thanks to the foreboding settings. The mansion itself is really interesting, with stratospheric staircases and intricate woodwork. John Hurt appears in a role that could best be described as a parallel to "Texas Chain Saw"s bizarre Hitch-hiker character (and to think, just a few years later he gave birth to an alien). Of course Peter Cushing is as compelling as always here, especially the moment in the script when he weeps over a portrait of his departed wife. In reality, Cushing's wife had recently passed away, and it is her picture in the frame.

See? All it takes to make a ghoul happy is a little pot.
5. Folks At Red Wolf Inn (1972)
Also known as: "Terror House", "Terror At Red Wolf Inn", "Secrets Beyond the Door", "Club Dead", "Terror On The Menu"


"...and if you want, we can even name our first child Tonka."
What would you do if you were a lonely college student and a Nigerian prince sent you an e-mail that said he needed your bank account to deposit a few million dollars? Well if you were Regina McKee, you would probably agree, because in this movie she falls for an even more outlandish scam: a letter she receives just in time for spring break announces that she's won an all-expenses paid vacation to a seaside resort, and when she calls the phone number they give her, she's told a private plane is coming to pick her up that very day. What she doesn't realize is she's on a collision course with cannibalism, a potential victim of a lovely old couple who lure girls to their mansion, where they are pampered and overfed before being slaughtered and served for dinner the next night (only the hosts, of course, know what the meat really is). Regina breaks the cycle when she and the old couple's bizarre young "grandson" Baby John take a liking to one another, but will it be enough to keep her from becoming pot roast?


"Folks At Red Wolf Inn" features an off kilter atmosphere that is rather unique. The horror elements aren't overstated, with very little onscreen violence and only the tamest of gory content. Instead director Bud Townsend emphasizes the oddball personalities of both the cannibals and their guests, with a memorable cast of interesting character actors. This movie got under my skin because even though it doesn't have the brutality of "Texas Chain Saw Massacre", the horrifying aspects came from unexpected places. It is a very early treatment of cannibalism as a matter-of-fact plot element, presenting characters who slaughter human victims like animals and eat them for food, yet still have to interact with them socially in order to maintain their food supply. The film's cynical twist is that it has shown us how Regina dodges her fate and has come to accept this lifestyle of cannibalism and murder as a trade off for finding love. It also contains one of the most unsettling dinner scenes ever committed to film, as a small dinner party takes part in an orgiastic feast on what we suspect to be human ribs, with half of the guests unaware that they're stuffing their faces with the remains of a human body.

The performers are all appealingly quirky as well. Veteran character actors Mary Jackson and Arthur Space are quietly menacing as the old cannibal couple, Jackson later becoming well known to a generation of TV viewers as a recurring character on "The Waltons". Margaret Avery who later appeared in Spielberg's "The Color Purple" appears here as a Red Wolf Inn main course named Edwina. Lead actress Linda Gillen is charming as the naive Regina, who is first lured to the estate as a meal but is ultimately seduced into the cannibal lifestyle by John Neilson, whose performance is weird and startling. Neilson's character is quiet throughout most of the film, suddenly lurching into terrifying violent outbursts, such as the moment that fans of the film have come to know as "the shark scene". Just watch.


4. Welcome To Arrow Beach (1974)
Also known as: "Tender Flesh", "Cold Storage"

Young drifter Meg Foster finds her early-70s mellow seriously harshed by a guy who keeps his freezer well stocked with the human victims that he lures to the house he shares with his sister. When he invites Meg to stay, she stumbles upon his meat-eating secret and escapes. Returning to the house with a sympathetic young man she meets when she's hospitalized, she manages to convince everyone that she isn't tripping after all.

"Yeah man, it was like, you know, really bad like the brown acid at Woodstock, man...."
Although not as violent as the film's ads would have you believe, "Welcome To Arrow Beach" does have some blood and one gross-out shock, a brief but satisfying moment when the freezer and its bloody contents are revealed. It's worth noting that when the film was re-released in the 80s as "Tender Flesh", the film's poster boldly proclaimed that this scene would be the most terrifying sight of your life, so it's a good thing they at least tried to make this moment scary. What makes "Welcome To Arrow Beach" so memorable though isn't really its horror, but its heavy 70s vibe. This film is also notable for featuring a number of well-known actors, including Foster, Laurence Harvey (his final film), and Joanna Pettet.
The cleaning staff is gonna be pissed when they see this.



3. Raw Meat (1973)
Also known as: "Death Line"

A somewhat more obscure British production that has found a greater audience on home video after a DVD re-release in 2003, "Death Line" was the original title before it played American theaters as "Raw Meat", a delightfully lurid title change that emphasizes the cannibalism aspect of the story. A series of disappearances in a particular station of the London Underground turns out to be the work of a demented tunnel dweller, a descendant of a group of workers who were hopelessly trapped in a turn-of-the-century tunnel collapse and presumed dead. Instead the group survived and continued on by eating their own dead. When his mate dies, this last living descendant starts to venture out into the underground to search for human victims to bring back to his lair for food.

David Ladd and Sharon Gurney are featured as a young London couple caught up in the murder investigation, Donald Pleasance sports a heavy accent as the Inspector in charge of the case, and Christopher Lee makes a cameo appearance as well. The movie isn't nearly as violent or gory as the trailer wants you to believe, but the premise is pretty nightmarish and there are a few strong moments, including a slow pan around the cannibal's lair revealing bodies in various states of decomposition and consumption. Although the cannibalism is implied rather than shown graphically on screen, the cinematography is pretty creepy, and the look of the movie is appropriately morbid and gloomy.


2. Cannibal Girls (1973)

Hailing from the same era as most of the other films on this list, "Cannibal Girls" is a Canadian twist on the people-eatin' theme, directed by Ivan "Ghostbusters" Reitman. Although "Cannibal Girls" could also be considered a low budget blend of comedy and horror, don't expect anything along the lines of "Ghostbusters". "Cannibal Girls" is set against the backdrop of the wintry Canadian countryside, with Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin (YES!) as a road tripping couple who stumble upon the legend of three ghostly cannibal girls in a quaint rural village. These supposed cannibal girls lived in a home that's now (supposedly) been turned into a (supposed) restaurant, so naturally our curious couple wants to visit, where they find out that some legends (and recipes) are just too good to not be true. Although there isn't much actual gore in "Cannibal Girls", the producers felt the need to include a William Castle type gimmick where an alarm sounds just before anything (supposedly) violent is about to happen, just in case you want to look away. Selling the movie with the promise of violence isn't the same thing as actually showing violence, and "Cannibal Girls" is about as tame as it can get. But it's oh-so-70s, and I am a total sucker for that.



She can bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan...
1. Messiah of Evil (1973)
Also known as: "Dead People", "Revenge Of The Screaming Dead", "Deep Swamp", "Messiah Of The Evil Dead"

A young woman travels to a small seaside town searching for her father, who has stopped communicating with her under mysterious circumstances. She finds that the town has been infected by the return of an occult figure known as the Messiah of Evil, who inspires the local townspeople to take up cannibalism. They also may or may not be dead.


I wanted to leave zombie films off this list, but this one is a must because zombie lists don't really want "Messiah of Evil", either. There aren't any real zombies in it, since the pasty-faced 'dead people' in the film aren't always visibly zombified, and they are able to walk, talk and run. Zombies don't run, do they?

"I told you before, I'm not a zombie, zombies aren't blue. Well, not THIS shade of blue, anyway."
"Messiah of Evil" earns its modest creep factor by depicting its villains as ordinary-looking people who have all been 'infected' by a conspiracy to attack people and consume their flesh. Although we never really see much of the Messiah of Evil, he's depicted holding 'sermons' where he seems to convert people to cannibalism as some sort of religious experience. The movie is an atmospheric slow burn punctuated by a few attack scenes that are low on gore but staged extremely well, particularly one where a female victim finds herself trapped in a supermarket and realizes she's about to become the daily special.

As far as the cast goes, the cult movie cred in "Messiah of Evil" is through the goddamn roof. Marianna Hill is the lead actress, she of such classick films as "The Baby", "Thumb Tripping", and "Blood Beach". Anitra Ford makes one of her precious few genre film appearances as well, and while her role isn't as juicy as it is in "Invasion of the Bee Girls", it's still a pleasure to watch her. Also on hand is Michael Greer, who appeared in films such as the fantastic "The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart" and "The Gay Deceivers". Joy Bang also features in this, doing one of her best characterizations as one of Michael Greer's two female traveling companions. She also has one of the film's best scenes, where she's attacked in a movie theater by an ever-increasing horde of cannibals who come into the theater and slowly gather behind her, like the crows gathering on Hitchcock's playground.

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It's probably inevitable that several of the films in this genre, as well as a few listed here, share very similar elements, but some of the plots are so alike that you wonder who had the first idea. "Folks at Red Wolf Inn", "Welcome To Arrow Beach" and "Warlock Moon" all feature older cannibals luring potential young female victims to their intended doom, as well as an important "what's in the freezer?" moment where the protagonist discovers the truth about the mystery meat she's been eating. Curiously, "Cannibal Girls" has an unexpected connection to "Folks At Red Wolf Inn" as well, due to its silly William Castle style gimmick of a "horror horn" going off before the supposedly gory moments; and in "Red Wolf Inn", when Regina opens the freezer to find decapitated heads, we hear the same oogah car horn sound. There's also some major crossover between "Cannibal Girls" and "Warlock Moon", as both of them feature a local legend mixing ghosts and cannibalism. Coincidence, or were they all copying each others recipes? Only the chefs know for sure.
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Shriek Of The Mutilated (1974)

January 30, 2015, 10:39 am
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Alright, I have to get something off my chest. I hate when people say a movie is "so bad it's good." If you enjoyed a movie for any reason, then mission accomplished, you were entertained. And seriously, don't ever say to anybody "The ONLY way to see this film is on Mystery Science Theater 3000." It only makes you look bad that you can't watch a movie like "Eegah!" without someone spoon-feeding you what's amusing about it. A bad movie is no fun. Films with very low budgets and non-actors are entertaining if the story is interesting enough and those performers are game.

I had that feeling while watching "Shriek Of The Mutilated", which truly defies description in a lot of ways. I will talk about it here, but I could never really explain what it's like, you must seek out and view this film for yourself. And don't just watch it half-assed in a browser while you're doing something else, put it on your TV if at all possible, and allow yourself to get drawn into its bizarre artificial world.


Yeah man, it's the 70s, dig?
Cannibalism seems to be a theme lately on the blog--is it ever far from our minds?--so here's another fantastic people-eating movie that just may be one of the best movies in the universe. Previously it was lodged in the back of my mind because I must have read about it someplace as "that bigfoot movie where it's not really bigfoot" and I thought I had seen it for sure. When I started watching it though, I quickly realized I had never actually seen this movie at all. And I was stunned.

"Shriek Of The Mutilated" takes place in that alternate universe known as the early 1970s, in a dimension somewhere between a porno film, an early daytime TV soap opera, and a nightmare. Four college students named Keith, Karen, Tom and Lynn are listening to professor Ernst Prell lecture them about the Yeti, a mythological creature that Prell has devoted his life to studying and tracking. He intends to take the four to his associate Karl Werner's remote country estate on Boot Island, because Werner claims a Yeti has been lurking in the wilderness around his estate.
Yeti vision!

Dr. Prell takes Keith to dinner while Karen, Lynn and Tom attend a swingin' 70s college party. Almost as if on cue, former student Spencer St. Claire has an alcoholic breakdown after he discovers Prell is taking more students on a Yeti field trip. It seems Spencer also accompanied Dr. Prell seven years earlier, an episode that only he and Dr. Prell survived, and he stoically tells the room all about his experience, warning anybody who would dare go with Dr. Prell on his adventure. Meanwhile, Dr. Prell takes Keith to an exclusive restaurant where everyone gives each other a knowing look while they are eating a strange dinner called "gin sung". Although he doesn't name Spencer, Prell alludes to his unfortunate experience and tells Keith "I expect more from you." Yeah Spencer is a real nut case, and the first sign that "Shriek Of The Mutilated" is a work of sheer genius comes in a scene where Spencer and his wife return home from the party and spontaneously murder each other. She breaks his bottle of vodka, so he cuts her throat with an electric carving knife. But the onset of death turns her into a true ninja: when Spencer climbs into the bathtub (fully clothed) after attacking her, she drags her dying self into the bathroom along with a toaster, which she plugs into a handy socket and tosses into the bathtub with him.

Hey, no shrieking...you were NOT mutilated.
Despite the pathetically inebriated warnings Spencer gave before his untimely electrocution, the doomed college foursome go with Dr. Prell anyway to Dr. Werner's isolated estate, where Werner and his manservant Laughing Crow terrify them by talking in hushed tones about the Yeti that howls in the woods at night, and Dr. Werner himself swears he has had several near-encounters with it. Well, actually Dr. Werner does all the talking, Laughing Crow just glowers strangely at them and looks pissed off and confused at the same time. Maybe he's just annoyed that Werner refers to him as "his Indian."

"Listen, I forgot to tell you...don't say anything about the boots. OK?"
The Yeti has certain characteristics that they have been able to determine, most notably a strange offensive odor and a heartbeat that can be heard loudly wherever it goes. The characteristic you will notice right away about the Yeti is that it is clearly a human being wearing a costume that wouldn't frighten anything other than a children's birthday party. Eventually though, we learn that it looks like a costume because it really IS a costume: Prell and Werner have invented the Yeti because they are a part of a secret cult of cannibals who lure Prell's college students to their deaths so they can become dinner. The Yeti gives them a cover for the disappearances, and an excuse to isolate the kids before murdering them.
The fatally scratched faces of death.
The atmosphere in "Shriek of the Mutilated" can best be described as a horror kitsch cartoon come to life. In fact, it resembles a violent episode of "Scooby Doo" in a number of ways, including the fact that the Professor's van looks a hell of a lot like the Mystery Machine:

Okay?
Not only that, but look at these two and just try and not see Daphne and Velma:


I'm sure she just forgot to take them off before she got in bed.
And what episode of "Scooby Doo" didn't end with the monster being revealed as a man in a mask? 

The visage of true terror, the beast itself confronts us!
But it isn't entirely kitschy. Although this movie is hopelessly dated and clearly not made by a film crew with a huge budget, "Shriek of the Mutilated" does have a strange effectiveness. It's quickly paced and never lets up, whether it's a horror sequence where the students are isolated and murdered, or one of the parts where the students shout histrionic lines of dialogue at one another. My favorite moment like this was the part where Keith and Karen allow Dr. Prell to convince them that, after both Tom and Lynn have been murdered by the "Yeti", the proper thing to do is to use pieces of Tom's body as bait to lure the Yeti into a trap. Karen finds herself the only person in the entire group who thinks the right thing to do is leave and find the police, and at one point she screams at Keith, "Stop treating me like a CHILD!" and he screams back at her "Well stop ACTING like one!" It's the line that should have been in "Mommie Dearest", but wasn't.
"What are you thinking, they told us to VIEW the scenery, not CHEW it."
The film's sets and sound design are gloriously cheap and alien. A swinging college party takes place in an apartment that doesn't look quite right, with strangely proportioned rooms and hanging lamps that one of the actors hits his head on as he walks down a hallway. The infamous double murder scene near the beginning of the film takes place in a claustrophobic apartment that could be part of either a dormitory or motel. The outdoor scenes at Dr. Prell's estate don't quite mesh with the large houses's interiors, which are best revealed in a set piece that is spellbinding in its strangeness: separated from Keith, Karen awakens from a dead faint to find herself alone in a room while the Yeti howls outside. She looks out the window and sees it running across the lawn toward the house. It then lunges at her through the window and drags itself inside, where it pursues her through the house in a dizzying chase.


The Yeti has a sound that follows it wherever it goes. The characters call it a "howl", but really what it sounds like is a person imitating a snarling Chihuahua while going "Num num num nummy yyyum yummmmm." There's also that ominous heartbeat, which is later revealed to be Laughing Crow playing drums into a loudspeaker system. It's staggering to ponder if the filmmakers wanted us to believe in the Yeti, too...although it is treated seriously early in the movie, the film's poster itself reveals that the Yeti is fake and the film's true villains are cannibals. And when you see somebody running quickly in a monster suit, nothing is more obvious than the fact that it's someone running in a monster suit. I wouldn't call it scary, but the giddy energy of these scenes is infectious.
Laughing Crow wants to axe you a question about cultural sensitivity.
And then that ending. Like I said before, the film's twist is revealed on the poster, but I suspect it was hoped during the filming and scripting that the audience would be shocked by it. The most shocking thing is that somehow the cheapness of everything that has come before it actually lends some loony credibility to the final act. After we find out the Yeti was fake all along, the fakeness we ourselves have witnessed actually makes sense, although there's no explaining the histrionic dialogue. Keith discovers that the Yeti is a ruse and escapes to get help, but Prell and Werner manage to scare Karen to death. The ritualistic aspect of what they've done apparently demands that the victim they intend to eat must not be bruised or physically harmed in any way, she must have died of fright. Keith brings back the police (apparently he could only find a single officer) and in the tradition of these movies, he is one of them, and Dr. Prell makes him the same offer that he apparently made to Spencer years ago: join them and eat human flesh (his own girlfriend), or be killed and eaten by all of them. The ambiguous ending has Keith salivating over the offering of eating Karen's flesh. Will Keith become a true cannibal, or end up like Spencer, only left alive to carry back the legend of the Yeti so more victims can be lured into the trap? 

The gore effects are mostly of the "fake bloody limb" variety, and the Yeti mostly seems to kill its victims by scratching their faces to death, but the movie loves to show it over and over again. Lynn even gets a pound sign scratched into her face during her meet-the-Yeti moment, breaking the facial death wound mold of two or three parallel stripes. Although directed by notorious exploitation filmmaker Michael Findlay ("Snuff", "The Touch Of Her Flesh", and numerous early porn features), the movie doesn't really go too far over the top with the on-screen violence. Even the scene where Spencer supposedly cuts his wife's throat with a carving knife is bloody but not explicit.

The acting in the film is like an early John Waters film, with what appears to be a group of the filmmaker's friends portraying the characters. "Overacting" is putting it mildly. Indeed, for most of these actors, "Shriek of the Mutilated" is their only credit on IMDB. A few of them do appear in the same director's "Invasion of the Blood Farmers", and lead actress Jennifer Stock also appears in "Bloodsucking Freaks". She turns in one of those performances where she's supposed to be pushed to the limits of her endurance, like her best girlfriend Sally Hardesty, but unlike Sally Hardesty, she doesn't escape becoming a meal. Incidentally, although we know "gin sung" is a meal made from human flesh, it also appears to be an actual meal prepared by a presumably cannibal chef. When Karen's body is presented to the cult members to be consumed, it looks like they just wheeled her body out on a gurney and intended to eat it "tartare".

The SHOWER CURTAIN. OK? Just look at it.

How you like me now?

   

"Shriek of the Mutilated" is a rickety, lunatic ride that I urge you to take. If you have seen this and were hoping it would be a bigfoot movie, I feel for you, but you did get some bigfoot buttons pushed, right? Personally, I found one of the better horror sequences in the movie to be a well staged scene where the first student gets picked off by the Yeti when he foolishly wanders off alone and investigates a spooky barn lying in ruins. The Yeti is glimpsed through the crudely spaced planks of wood while stalking Tom from the roof, the ominous heartbeat combining with some disorienting camera angles to create a trippy atmosphere that will either annoy or thrill you. What can I say, I'm usually thrilled by these things.





I ask you, is this not the best title in the entire history of cinema?

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Legend of Boggy Creek - 1973 newspaper ad.

March 5, 2015, 9:44 am
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Fantastic 1973 ad for "The Legend Of Boggy Creek". I love the lengthy text!
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Grave Of The Vampire - Garden Of The Dead - 1973 newspaper ads

March 5, 2015, 9:55 am
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Kyra Schon -- iconic Living Dead Girl -- talks about why her character just won't stay dead.

March 19, 2015, 8:28 pm
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The cultural phenomenon that is the 1968 horror film "Night of the Living Dead" has long been promoted using the countenance of one of its more noteworthy ghouls: poor little nine-year-old Karen Cooper, who found out the hard way that when you get bitten by a zombie, that means you're already well on your way to becoming one.

The actress who played her is Kyra Schon. Her father, Karl Hardman, was one of the producers of "Night of the Living Dead", and also starred in the film as the antagonistic blowhard Harry Cooper. Nine years old at the time of the movie's filming, Kyra was a natural choice to play Harry's young daughter Karen, and although she only has one speaking line in the film (feverish from a zombie bite, she moans "I hurt!"), she features strongly in the film's shocking climax: presumably having died from her ghoul-inflicted wound, Karen becomes a ghoul herself and cannibalizes her father's remains, then viciously stabs her mother to death with a cement trowel.

Karen Cooper may have been a little anti-social, but Kyra herself is well loved by "NOTLD" fans, who greet her at horror conventions and frequently display tattoos of her ghoulish character proudly engraved on their bodies. We sat down so I could ask her some questions about what the experience of making the film was like for her, as well as what it means to the people for whom the classic film holds an eternally morbid fascination.

      ______________________________________________________________________


Groovy Doom: Fans of the movie, and I'm sure those who were traumatized by it, all seem to be able to talk about the first time they ever saw "Night of the Living Dead". Everybody remembers that, it was sort of ground zero...

Kyra Schon: Where were you when Kennedy was shot?

GD: ...exactly! I want to go even further back though, when was the first time you became aware of the project and the creation of the film?

KS: It was early in 1967, I think. My mom woke me up for school one morning, and she said "Honey, you're going to flip...you're going to be in a movie." (laughs) And I said, "What?" And she said "Dad is co-producing this new movie and he's going to talk to you about it, and he wants you to be in it."

So instantly, you know, life changes. I guess I saw him later that day or the next day, and he explained it was a horror movie and I was going to be playing this little monster, creature, thing....I don't remember exactly what he told me about her, but I remember just being beside myself like, oh my god, my fondest wish had come true. I was watching horror movies from the time I was four years old on "Chiller Theater" [a wildly popular weekly Pittsburgh horror host show whose host, Bill Cardille, also appears in "Night of the Living Dead" as a TV reporter]. At that time, "Chiller Theater" was on Saturday afternoon, and it was accessible to me. My best friend just up the street and I used to watch it, every Saturday afternoon we'd curl up in the same chair and watch these schlocky movies and be thrilled and terrified and amused. It was so vastly entertaining for us, and so I thought wow, I can be one of those monsters, that's great.



GD: Did you know what the movie was about?

KS: I don't know if I knew at that time. He told me that I was gonna stab Marilyn, and that I was gonna eat his arm. I don't remember what my reaction was, I guess I was just like "OK yeah, whatever, that's fine."

GD: Who explained to you what cannibalism was?

KS: (laughs) Well, that would have been my dad.

GD: You were young!

KS: Yeah, I was 9. I think maybe kids are more accepting of things because they don't have anything to compare it to. I didn't realize that we were breaking new ground because I didn't know everything that came before. I had seen "Frankenstein" and "The Mummy" and "The Wolf Man", "Little Shop of Horrors", those kinds of things. In that repertoire, there was nothing at all like what we were doing, but I didn't know that it was new.

GD: Cannibalism really freaks people out, at least it did when "Night of the Living Dead" was made.

KS: Well you know, it's not really cannibalism when you're a zombie. You're kind of not the same species anymore.

GD: What do you remember about being on the set?

KS: My scenes weren't very interesting because until I met Duane on the first floor, there was nobody in the scenes with me. I was lying on the table, I said "I hurt", and that was all. When I stabbed Marilyn, she wasn't even in the room with me, I was stabbing into a pillow. So there was no real interaction. There was no sound, that was looped in later, and I asked my dad "How long should I be doing this?" and he said "Keep going, keep going, keep going..." I've been told it was 14, and I've since counted and I stabbed the pillow 14 times.

A lot of it was really kind of boring. The scene where Harry and Helen are arguing in the basement, that whole "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" vibe, it was so miserable because it was much longer. It was so much longer! And I think they had written their own dialogue, which was....(dramatic eye roll)...it was brutal. And I'm lying there on the table thinking "I wonder if anybody has ever died of boredom? I am so bored!" And then they cut all of that, thank god. That's why that weird jump cut is in there, if you know it's in there you'll know to look for it.

My dad and Marilyn were doing the makeup, and they were doing wounds on some of the ghouls with mortician's wax, and it looked really cool, and I wanted one. I said "Can I get a wound, too?" and my dad said "No. It just doesn't go with the story." I just had a bandage covering...nothing! I got really good at doing those wounds after the movie, on my friends and on myself!

GD: Did George Romero give you direction, or was it your dad?

KS: My dad gave me direction. George probably figured I would take direction more readily from my dad than from a stranger. George couldn't have been nicer, though, there is nothing intimidating about him at all.  He's just a big friendly teddy bear of a man, and I liked him a lot. He's just a great guy.

GD: Why do you think it is that your character is so well known and iconic, what is it that makes her fascinating to fans of the film?

KS: I think because she was the first of her kind, she was the first kid zombie. She killed her mother, which is a taboo, so is eating her father's arm which is really kind of gross. I think that's why she became so iconic, because she blew people's minds. She was not a little girl full of sugar and spice...well, maybe she started out that way, but suddenly we couldn't relate to this thing she became, she still looked like a little girl but now she wanted to eat you.

GD: Your image is so closely associated with the film, too.

KS: It certainly is, it's everywhere. When I go to conventions and I see it, I'm used to seeing it. I see people's tattoos and it gives me a thrill, it's amazing that someone tattooed my face on their body. But when I'm not at a convention and I see it, I just want to jump up and down and go "Look, it's me!" Out here in the world, it's really weird to see it.

When I went to see "28 Days Later", I went with a friend of mine and we were standing in line, and there was a guy in front of us wearing a leather jacket with my face painted on the back. My friend nudged me and said "Are you gonna tell him?" But I didn't because, why would he believe me? (laughs) He would have been like, "Sure!"

GD: Do you remember the first film that terrified you?

KS: I've tried to remember, and I just don't know. But the one that sticks with me the most is "The Crawling Eye", aka "The Trollenberg Terror". It's still one of my favorite movies of all time, I love it. I don't know what it was about that movie, but it really stuck with me. I still do weird little sculptures and jewelry pieces with that motif. It's awesome and it's held up pretty well. When I watch it now, I try to watch it objectively, and it's a good movie.

And of course I love "The Wasp Woman". I loved "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman", that was great. The silent version of "Phantom of the Opera" really scared me, and "The Mummy" scared me a lot. "Frankenstein" didn't scare me, I felt sorry for him. "The Wolf Man" I felt sorry for, because he was like a dog. He was kind of a victim, I thought I could get along with him, he was cool. "Dracula" didn't scare me either, because Bela Lugosi's accent was a lot like my grandfather's accent, and that wasn't scary. I wasn't ever really afraid of vampires or werewolves, but the Mummy was the one that you really couldn't reason with. He was just sort of singularly focused on a task and no matter what got in his way, he was going to accomplish that.

GD: Do you still have any memorabilia from the film, like your costume?

KS: No, the costume was really my own dress, and that was given away to the Salvation Army after I outgrew it. The fishnet stockings I don't have anymore, either, those were mine. I was wearing off-white fishnet stockings. It's pretty funny, with that baby doll dress...I was quite the trendsetter.

GD: Someone out there got a priceless piece of movie memorabilia, and they didn't even know it.

KS: I sold the invitation to the premiere, and the bandage, a couple years ago, but some friends of mine have that stuff, so I can go visit if I feel the need. I still have the music box that you hear in the film. The box in the movie that actually spun around, that didn't have any sound, so they used my grandmother's music box for the sound. It was the stunt music box! It's broken, I have to get it repaired. I think I still have some of the makeup, too.

My dad had a lot of that stuff, and I don't know where it went after he passed away. A lot of it belonged to him originally, like the coat tree was his. So was the tire iron that went into the ghoul's head, the one played by John Russo. The radio was originally his parents, they bought it in new in 1937 or something.



GD: When did you first see the film, at the premiere?

KS: Yeah, but when I saw it none of it surprised me, so maybe I'd seen bits and pieces of the film before that. I was allowed to invite a couple of my friends to it who were close to me in age, it was just a few days before my 11th birthday. I spent most of the movie watching their reactions to the various scenes, because they were shrieking and jumping out of their seats, which I thought was hilarious. But none of it scared me. The only thing I didn't like when I saw it was seeing my dad get shot. It was uncomfortable, I didn't like that, even though I was there for the filming of it and it was actually really funny. When he was doing his death scene, he clutched the coat tree, and each time he would try and fall down the steps he'd get tangled in the coat tree and it would follow him down the steps. Everybody was laughing so hard they were in tears, they'd done it so many times, but then seeing it afterwards, it still bothered me.

GD: What did your friends tell you about the movie after they'd seen it?

KS: They loved it, they were scared! They thought it was pretty cool that they got to see it.

GD: I'm sure they loved your big moment with the cement trowel.

KS: (laughs) Yes, they did!

GD: To me, that's the most nightmarish moment in the film. That's what takes it way over the line from just being a horror movie into something truly subversive, this little kid murdering her own mother in a creepy basement. It was so shocking and dark.

KS: I think that's kind of why people were walking out feeling shell shocked afterwards, because they didn't expect to see something like that. But I still think that it's not as disturbing as "The Bad Seed", which was a decade before, because she knew exactly what she was doing.

GD: Absolutely, she liked it.

KS: For her, it was murder. For Karen Cooper, who had become a ghoul, it was just a biological imperative, rather than just living out her sociopathic dreams! But it's pretty gruesome, anyway. People have asked me, why did she pick up the trowel and then kill her mother and walk away? Why didn't she eat her? Presumably, ghouls want to kill you because they want to eat you, but she didn't want to eat her, she just wanted to kill her. So what was that about? Maybe there was a little "Bad Seed" in her, too.

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Here's a link to Kyra's personal website, ghoulnextdoor.com, where you can browse some of the merchandise and memorabilia she offers, items related to "Night of the Living Dead" as well as her own fantastic handcrafted jewelry. You can also find this at her Etsy shop, StoneHouseArts.
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Shock (1977) aka Beyond The Door II (1979)

March 22, 2015, 1:55 pm
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Alternate titles turn me on. I love the way movies used to be re-released and retitled, as if changing what the movie's called suddenly made it a brand new property, like when "God Told Me To" was re-released to theaters as a film called "Demon". Movies like "Don't Look In The Basement!" and "Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things" had two or three different titles, sometimes more. Then there were some foreign genre films that were released to theaters in the United States and marketed as fake sequels, like when Mario Bava's "Twitch of the Death Nerve" was released to American theaters as "Last House On The Left Part 2". The other Bava retitle I'm thinking of is my feature tonight, Bava's 1977 final theatrical film "Shock". It was issued in the US in 1979 as "Beyond the Door II", despite it not being a sequel to anything, but never mind--David Colin Jr., the youngest son from "Beyond The Door" plays the role of a different little boy in THIS movie, too, so there's that slim connection. It's extremely uneven, and suffers greatly from a poorly acted dub track, not that the dialogue we hear makes matters any better.


But Bava's films are visual experiences, and "Shock" is rewarding if you're willing to tolerate the parts of the film that are slow and talky--and one of the people you'd have to blame for that is the director's son, Lamberto Bava, who is credited as a screen writer. Italian horror icon Daria Nicolodi stars as Dora, a woman who returns to the house she once shared with her deceased heroin-junkie husband, who everyone thinks committed suicide simply because his boat was found adrift at sea. Seven years after his disappearance, and supposedly recovered from a mental breakdown, Dora returns to the same house with her new husband and her nine-year-old son Marco, with only dim memories of what actually happened following her husband's suicide. The kid starts to channel the dead father's ghost and Strange Things Start Happening. Or is she just cracking up again?

Although it's not Bava's best by any means, there are a few transcendent moments to hang onto, and you also have to admit that even Bava's trash is interesting to look at. His camera wizardry is in full effect in "Shock" and does not disappoint. The lighting, usually garish and oversaturated, is instead strategically subdued.  There are a few mind-bending shots in the film, such as one that seems to have been created by strapping poor Daria Nicolodi to a rig and filming her face as she was spun upside down.

Another brilliantly imaginative scene follows the progress of a ghostly image that prowls the walls of the house's basement, circling the walls. The camera pans back to reveal Marco, holding a family photograph with his stepfather cut out of it; the prowling "ghost" is the light of a bare bulb shining through the cut out photograph. The most terrifying image in "Shock" is one that was unforgivably revealed in the film's trailer, a breathtaking gut punch as the little boy rushes toward his mother from the other end of a hallway, morphing into the adult-size corpse of his father just as he reaches her. I was also really creeped out by a scene where Marco gets into bed with his mother and caresses her sleeping body in a way that seems to threaten sexual violence, his hand appearing as that of the dead husband.


The thing that probably will make or break "Shock" for you is how much Daria Nicolodi you can take. She's the focus of nearly every scene in the movie, and a lot of what's on screen is either something that's supposed to be going on in her mind, or lingering closeups of her face. You might think Marco would be the focus of the film, since he's a possessed little boy, but the movie treats Dora as if she's more important, with Marco reduced to nothing more than a lurking presence throughout most of it. Although a lot of the time Dora's on screen she is freaking out and frightened, there's one great camp moment when she's having a hard time stashing a dead body with a giant pick axe sticking out of it and a rat runs up her dress and starts biting her.


John Steiner also appears in the film as Dora's new husband, Bruno. Steiner's been in a lot of things you've probably seen, such as Argento's "Tenebre", Ruggero Deodato's films "Cut and Run" and "Body Count", and "I Don't Want To Be Born" with Joan Collins. The score is done by Goblin-associated act Libra, and is heavy on the prog-rock themes, but is also reminiscent of Stelvio Cipriani's score for "Twitch of the Death Nerve" with a heavy bongo vibe going on in a few scenes.



I should acknowledge that even though this movie has nothing to do with "Beyond The Door", "Shock" still has one big thing going for it, and that's the artistry of Mario Bava. Both movies share the weird, disjointed atmosphere and claustrophobic sound design that movies get when they are dubbed, but there's a certain visual aspect too that links the two films. Bava's shots seem more artfully composed, but both movies feature typical "Exorcist" tropes such as furniture flying around by itself, doors and drawers flapping open, and moments with a very loud audio mix. Most importantly, even though "Shock" doesn't show quite as much influence from "The Exorcist", it is a freak show just like "Beyond The Door" was. If it had just been a little bit crazier, it might have made a bigger impression.






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April Ghouls 2015! This weekend!

April 19, 2015, 11:23 am
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Here comes the April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama 2015 at the Riverside Drive-In in Vandergrift, PA--with an absolutely fantastic lineup not be missed! Come out and get the full drive-in horror experience from the 70s through the 80s, with a marathon four movies each night and TONS of classic horror trailers, drive-in intermission reels, and other shorts in between.

I'll be there both nights, here is my picture so when you see me, you can come up and say hello and you will know it's me:

"Hi my name is Bill and I write Groovy Doom.
Would you buy me a funnel cake?
And recommend a good dermatologist?" 

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