Colonel Mortimer Will Have His Revenge

2011 Year End Blowout Extravaganza! Posterized: Movies Watched March/April

2012-01-30T18:00:00.000-08:00

Reminder from yesterday's post:

-Only films watched from beginning to their end count. So if I turned on HBO and caught say Listen to Me at the 20 minute mark and watched the rest of the film, it is not eligible. Neither would Left Behind: World at War be if I started to watched it and Jesus came down to earth to receive his follows up to the bosom of heaven, thus interrupting the broadcast with 10 minutes remaining. However, if I went to the cinema to see Like Father, Like Son at a repertory screening at the New Beverly, and watch the film from start to finish, then it does count.

-TV movies count, but TV series do not, even special two parters (but for shits and giggles, and since I watched my fair share of television as well, I am including the TV series whose seasons I watched in their entirety at the end of each entry. Remember, some of these I started pre-2011)

-I count each movie I see as a viewing, so if I watched Mamma Mia! ten times, that counts as ten viewings! AND DON’T JUDGE ME!!!!!

-Presentation became a point of contention for some films, so here’s what I decided, if the film was presented in separate intervals like Carlos, which was separated by Netflix into three nearly two hour segments with credits, it counted as three films. However, when I saw the Kill Bill: Whole Bloody Affair cut, it only counted as one film, despite its previous split incarnation

Films in italics are films that I would rate a B+ or higher on the ol’ grading system, or 4 or more stars on the 5 star system

And finally for films whose year of release is written this way (2010/11) the first is the year of the film’s premiere release (or for foreign films, year of release in their country) the second is the American release date, for year end lists, since I am American at least until Alvin and the Chipmunks 4: Chipocalypse Now premieres, I go by the second date.

March

April

TV

Films in italics are films that I would rate a B+ or higher on the ol' grading system, or 4 stars or more on a 5 star scale.

And for films whose year of release is written like this...(2010/2011), the first year is the year of the film's premiere release (either at a festival or for foreign films, the year of their release in their particular country), the second year is the American release date. For year end lists, since I am an American at least until Rick Santorium is our president, I go by the second date.

80.) 3.1-I Live in Fear (1955, Akira Kurosawa)/DVR (TCM)/1st
81.) 3.3-The Cannonball Run (1981, Hal Needham)/DVD/1st
82.) 3.3-The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2) (1981/82, George Miller)/Blu Ray/2nd
83.) 3.5-On Golden Pond (1981, Mark Rydell)/DVD/1st
84.) 3.6-The Anderson Tapes (1970, Sindey Lumet)/Theatre (New Beverly)/1st
85.) 3.6-Vengeance (2010, Johnnie To)/Netflix Streaming/1st
86.) 3.8-The Seven Per Cent Solution (1976, Herbert Ross)/DVR (TCM)/1st
87.) 3.8-Black Samson (1974, Charles Bail)/DVD/1st
88.) 3.9-Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948, Charles Barton)/DVD/1st
89.) 3.10-Galaxy Quest (1999, Dean Parisot)/DVD/2nd
90.) 3.10-Four Lions (2010, Chris Morris)/Blu Ray/1st
91.) 3.11-Precious (2009, Lee Daniels)/Netflix Streaming/1st
92.) 3.11-I Need That Record (2008, Brendan Toller)/Netflix Streaming/1st
93.) 3.12-Sharky's Machine (1981, Burt Reynolds)/DVD/1st
94.) 3.14-Elvis (1979, John Carpenter)/DVD/1st
95.) 3.16-Tony Manero (2008, Pablo Larrain)/DVR (HBO)/1st
96.) 3.17-The Lonely Guy (1984, Arthur Hiller)/DVD/2nd
97.) 3.17-Minnie and Moskovitz (1971, John Cassavettes)/Netflix Streaming/1st
98.) 3.18-Death Rides a Horse (1968, Giulio Petrini)/DVD/1st
99.) 3.18-Mystery Team (2009, Dan Eckman)/Netflix Streaming/1st
100.) 3.19-Never Let Me Go (2010, Mark Romanek)/Blu Ray/1st
101.) 3.20-Rango (2011, Gore Verbinski)/Theatre (Arclight Pasadena)/1st
102.) 3.21-Code Unknown (2000, Michael Haneke)/DVD/2nd
103.) 3.21-Strange Behavior (1981, Michael Laughlin)/DVR (TCM)/1st
104.) 3.22-Assassination (1987, Peter Hunt)/DVD/1st
105.) 3.22-An American Werewolf in London (1981, John Landis)/Blu Ray/6th
106.) 3.22-Shanghai Express (1932, Josef von Sternberg)/DVR (TCM)/1st
107.) 3.23-The Big Boss (aka Fists of Fury) (1971, Lo Wei)/DVD/1st
108.) 3.26-Goijira (1954, Ishiro Honda)/Netflix Streaming/1st
109.) 3.26-Bigger than Life (1956, Nicholas Ray)/Blu Ray/1st
110.) 3.28-Female Prisoner # 701: Scorpion (1972, Shunya Ito)/DVD/2nd
111.) 3.28-Certified Copy (2010/11, Abbas Kiarostami)/Theatre (Laemle Playhouse)/1st
112.) 3.28-Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997, Werner Herzog)/DVD/1st
113.) 3.29-Messenger of Death (1989, J. Lee Thompson)/DVD/1st
114.) 3.30-The Entity (1983, Sidney J. Furie)/Netflix Streaming/2nd
115.) 4.1-Rubber (2010/11, Quentin Dupieux)/DVR (HD TV)/1st
116.) 4.3-The Lincoln Lawyer (2011, Brad Furman)/Theatre (Laguna Canyon Cinema)/1st
117.) 4.3-Conan the Barbarian (1982, John Milius)/DVD/2nd
118.) 4.4-Conan the Destroyer (1984, Marco Ferreri)/DVD/2nd
119.) 4.5-Dillinger is Dead (1969, Marco Ferreri)/DVD/1st
120.) 4.5-...All the Marbles (1981, Robert Aldrich)/DVD/1st
121.) 4.6-Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair (2003/04, Quentin Tarantino), Theatre (New Beverly)/1st (of this cut)
122.) 4.7-My Cousin Vinny (1992, Jonathan Lynn)/DVR (Encore)/2nd
123.) 4.8-Jane Eyre (2011, Cary Fukunaga)/Theatre (Laemle Playhouse)/1st
124.) 4.8-Play Misty for Me (1971, Clint Eastwood)/DVD/2nd
125.) 4.9-The Apostle (1997, Robert Duvall)/DVD/1st
126.) 4.10-Deadhead Miles (1971, Vernon Zimmerman)/Netflix Streaming/1st
127.) 4.11-A Clockwork Orange (1971, Stanley Kubrick)/DVD/approx 7th
128.) 4.12-Inglorious Basterds (2009, Quentin Tarantino)/Blu Ray/3rd
129.) 4.14-Caught (1948, Max Ophuls)/Theatre (The Egyptian)/1st
130.) 4.14-April Fool's Day (1986, Fred Walton)/DVR (Showtime)/2nd
131.) 4.16-99 River Street (1953, Phil Karlson)/Netflix Streaming/1st
132.) 4.17-Red Cliff part I (2009, John Woo)/Blu Ray/1st
133.) 4.18-Scream 4 (2011, Wes Craven)/Theatre (Glendale Americana)/1st
134.) 4.19-Get Him to the Greek (2010, Nicholas Stoller)/DVR (Cinemax)/1st
135.) 4.21-License to Kill (1989, John Glenn)/DVD/2nd
136.) 4.22-Red Cliff part II (2009, John Woo)/Blu Ray/1st
137.) 4.23-Source Code (2011, Duncan Jones)/Theatre (Glendale Americana)/1st
138.) 4.23-Scanners (1981, David Cronenberg)/DVD/3rd
139.) 4.24-Nowhere Boy (2010, Sam Taylor-Wood)/Blu Ray/1st
140.) 4.25-Scream 3 (2000, Wes Craven)/DVR (Showtime)/2nd
141.) 4.25-Who Can Kill a Child? (1976, Narcisco Ibanez Serrador)/DVD/1st
142.) 4.25-Ms. 45 (1981, Abel Ferrera)/DVD/1st
143.) 4.26-35 Shots of Rum (2009, Claire Denis)/Netflix Streaming/1st
144.) 4.26-Daisy Kenyon (1947, Otto Preminger)/DVD/1st
145.) 4.27-Breezy (1973, Clint Eastwood)/Netflix Streaming/1st
146.) 4.28-Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1959, Richard Brooks)/DVD/1st
147.) 4.29-Jane Eyre (2006, Susanna White)/DVD/1st
148.) 4.29-Blow Out (1981, Brian DePalma)/Blu Ray/approx 5th
149.) 4.30-13 Assassins (2011, Takashi Miike)/DVR (HD TV)/1st

TV Series

TV2.) Party Down/Season 2 (2010, John Enbom, Paul Rudd, Dan Etheridge, Rob Thomas)

Tv3.) Treme/Season 1 (2010, David Simon, Eric Overmyr)

TV4.) The Rockford Files/Season 2 (1975-76, Stephen J. Cannell)

TV5.) Star Trek/Season 3 (1968-69, Gene Roddenberry)

TV6.) The Walking Dead/Season 1 (2010, Frank Darabont)

2011 Year End Blowout Extravaganza! Posterized: Movies Watched January-February

2012-01-29T16:00:00.000-08:00

In the 2010 I fell about a dozen or so titles short of averaging watching a movie a day. So, when the clock strucketh twelve on January 1, 2011, I looked at myself in the mirror, where I said to my reflection, “come on, you’re anti-social, and have little to no life of which to speak. You can do better. Nay, you must do better!” So I set out to shatter my normal average of about 300 films viewed per year. It was rough, I had my doubts, there were days when I wanted to just read a book, or the sunshine beckoned, but luckily my elderly rascally manager Cortland Finnegan (no relation to the Tennessee Titan cornerback) whipped me into shape during my moments of doubt, and after a good four minute training montage set to a blistering poppy number, I was back on the horse. And well, let’s just say I passed the 365 film mark by mid-November.

So to celebrate my ocular fortitude, before I do my normal viewing analysis where I break down films watched by decade, country, what Baldwin brother was in said film, etc, I thought I’d share my “accomplishment” by displaying the posters for all the films watched in 2011, two months a day. To keep it tidy, let’s do this chronological style, staring with January-February.

A few notes:

-Only films watched from beginning to their end count. So if I turned on HBO and caught say The Wizard at the 20 minute mark and watched the rest of the film, it is not eligible. Neither would Little Monsters be if I started to watched it and Martians come down to earth and destroyed my satellite dish with 10 minutes remaining. However, if I went to the cinema to see Vice Versa at a repertory screening at the New Beverly, and watch the film from start to finish, then it does count. (note to self: watch more Fred Savage films).

-TV movies count, but TV series do not, even special two parters (but for shits and giggles, and since I watched my fair share of television as well, I am including the TV series whose seasons I watched in their entirety at the end of each entry. Remember, some of these I started pre-2011)

-I count each movie I see as a viewing, so if I watched Mamma Mia! ten times, that counts as ten viewings! AND DON’T JUDGE ME!!!!!

-Presentation became a point of contention for some films, so here’s what I decided, if the film was presented in separate intervals like Carlos, which was separated by Netflix into three nearly two hour segments with credits, it counted as three films. However, when I saw the Kill Bill: Whole Bloody Affair cut, it only counted as one film, despite its previous split incarnation

Films in italics are films that I would rate a B+ or higher on the ol’ grading system, or 4 or more stars on the 5 star system

And finally for films whose year of release is written this way (2010/11) the first is the year of the film’s premiere release (or for foreign films, year of release in their country) the second is the American release date, for year end lists, since I am American at least until Alvin and the Chipmunks 4: Battlechip Potemkin premieres, I go by the second date.

January

February

TV Series

1.) 1.1-Remember the Night (1940, Mitchell Leisen)/DVR (TCM)/1st
2.) 1.1-Breathless (1960, Jean Luc Godard)/DVD/3rd
3.) 1.1-Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979, Joan Micklin Silver)/Netflix Streaming/1st
4.) 1.2-Play It Again, Sam (1972, Herbert Ross)/DVD/2nd
5.) 1.3-The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009, Wes Anderson)/Blu Ray/1st
6.) 1.4-Battles Without Honor or Humanity: The Final Episode (1974, Kinji Fukasaku)/DVD/1st
7.) 1.5-Night of the Demon (1980, James C. Wasson)/DVD/1st
8.) 1.5-Family Plot (1976, Alfred Hitchcock)/DVD/2nd
9.) 1.6-The Book of Eli (2010, The Hughes Brothers)/DVR (HBO)/1st
10.) 1.7-Everyone Else (2010, Maren Ade)/Netflix Streaming/1st
11.) 1.8-Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991, Rachel Talalay)/DVD/3rd
12.) 1.9-Happy Go Lucky (2008, Mike Leigh)/DVR (Starz)/1st
13.) 1.9-I'm Still Here (2010, Casey Affleck)/Netflix Streaming/1st
14.) 1.10-Rome Open City (1945, Roberto Rosellini)/DVD/1st
15.) 1.11-Dogtooth (2009/10, Giorgos Lanthimos)/Theatre (Cinefamily)/1st
16.) 1.11-The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973, Peter Yates)/DVD/2nd
17.) 1.12-Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990, Mick Garris)/DVD/2nd
18.) 1.14-The Big Lebowski (1998, the Coen Brothers)/DVD/approx 5th
19.) 1.14-Best Worst Movie (2010, Michael Stephenson)/DVD/1st
20.) 1.16-Blue Valentine (2010, Derek Cianfrance)/Theatre (Arclight Pasadena)/1st
21.) 1.17-The Fighter (2010, David O. Russell)/Theatre (Arclight Pasadena)/1st
22.) 1.17-The Walking Stick (1970, Eric Till)/DVR (TCM)/1st
23.) 1.19-Hell Up in Harlem (1973, Larry Cohen)/DVD/1st
24.) 1.19-Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970, Don Siegel)/Netflix Streaming/1st
25.) 1.20-Life During Wartime (2010, Todd Solodnz)/DVR (TMC)/1st
26.) 1.21-Paris, Texas (1984, Wim Wenders)/Blu Ray/2nd
27.) 1.22-Youth in Revolt (2010, Miguel Arteta/DVR (TMC)/1st
28.) 1.23-Nighthawks (1981, Bruce Malmouth)/DVD/2nd
29.) 1.23-Frozen (2010, Adam Green)/Netflix Streaming/1st
30.) 1.25-Planet of the Vampires (1961, Mario Bava)/DVD/2nd
31.) 1.26-Lola Montes (1955, Max Ophuls)/Netflix Streaming/1st
32.) 1.28-Fuzz (1972, Richard A. Colla)/DVR (Showtime)/1st
33.) 1.28-127 Hours (2010, Danny Boyle)/Theatre (Laemle Playhouse)/1st
34.) 1.28-The Last of the Mohicans (1992, Michael Mann)/Blu Ray/2nd
35.) 1.30-The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981, Karl Reisz)/Netflix Streaming/1st
36.) 1.31-Victory (1981, John Huston)/DVD/1st
37.) 2.1-Hell Night (1981, Tom DeSimone)/DVD/1st
38.) 2.3-Hard Rain (1998, Mikael Salomon)/DVD/1st
39.) 2.4-Green Zone (2010, Paul Greengrass)/DVR (HBO)/1st
40.) 2.4-Enter the Void (2009/10, Gaspar Noe)/Netflix Streaming/1st
41.) 2.4-Easy A (2010, Will Gluck)/Blu Ray/1st
42.) 2.4-Night of the Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton)/Blu Ray/3rd
43.) 2.5-Major Dundee (1965, Sam Peckinpah)/DVD/1st
44.) 2.7-Above the Law (1988, Andrew Davis)/Netflix Streaming/2nd
45.) 2.9-Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994, Wes Craven)/DVD/3rd
46.) 2.9-The Mechanic (1972, Michael Winner)/DVR (MGM HD)/2nd
47.) 2.10-Red Sun (1971, Terrence Young)/DVD/1st
48.) 2.11-Dirty Harry (1971, Don Siegel)/DVD/approx 4th
49.) 2.11-Dark Forces (1980, Simon Wincer)/Netflix Streaming/1st
50.) 2.11-They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969, Sydney Pollack)/Theatre (LACMA)/2nd
51.) 2.11-The China Syndrome (1979, James Bridges)/Theatre (LACMA)/1st
52.) 2.12-Cold Weather (2011, Aaron Katz)/Theatre (Laemle Sunset)/1st
53.) 2.12-Looker (1981, Michael Crichton)/DVR (Encore)/1st
54.) 2.12-The American (2010, Anton Corbijin)/Blu Ray/1st
55.) 2.12-Horsefeathers (1932, Norman MacLeod)/DVD/2nd
56.) 2.13-The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954, Jack Arnold)/DVD/2nd
57.) 2.13-The Mechanic (2011, Simon West)/Theatre (AMC Citywalk)/1st
58.) 2.13-The Roomate (2011, Christian Christiansen)/Theatre (AMC Citywalk)/1st
59.) 2.13-The Manitou (1978, William Girdler)/Netflix Streaming/1st
60.) 2.14-MacGruber (2010, Jorma Taccone)/Blu Ray/1st
61.) 2.15-Carlos part 1 (2010, Oliver Assayas)/Netflix Streaming/1st
62.) 2.16-Gas-s-s (1970, Roger Corman)/DVD/1st
63.) 2.19-Still Bill (2010, Damani Baker, Alex Vlack)/DVR (Showtime)/1st
64.) 2.19-Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy (2010, Daniel Farrands, Andrew Kasch)/DVD/1st
65.) 2.20-Cabaret (1972, Bob Fosse)/DVD/1st
66.) 2.20-Take the Money and Run (1969, Woody Allen)/DVD/3rd
67.) 2.20-Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock)/Blu Ray/approx 15th
68.) 2.21-Carlos part II (2010, Oliver Assayas)/Netflix Streaming/1st
69.) 2.23-Carlos part III (2010, Oliver Assayas)/Netflix Streaming/1st
70.) 2.23-The Trip (1967, Roger Corman)/DVD/1st
71.) 2.24-Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982, Carl Reiner)/DVD/2nd
72.) 2.25-Paternity (1981, David Steinberg)/DVR (Showtime)/1st
73.) 2.25-Unknown (2011, Juame Collet-Serra)/Theatre (Arclight Pasadena)/1st
74.) 2.25-Paisan (1946, Roberto Rosellini)/DVD/1st
75.) 2.25-Let Me In (2010, Matt Reeves)/Blu Ray/1st
76.) 2.26-The Heartbreak Kid (1971, Elaine May)/Netflix Streaming/1st
77.) 2.26-The Illusionist (2010, Sylvian Chomet)/Theatre (Los Feliz 3)/1st
78.) 2.26-The Backlot Murders (2002, David DeFalco)/Netflix Streaming/1st
79.) 2.28-The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008/10, Kim Ji-Woon)/DVD/1st

TV Series

TV1.) Party Down/Season 1 (2009, John Enbom, Paul Rudd, Dan Etheridge, Rob Thomas)

24 Frames: Gremlins (1984, Joe Dante)

2012-01-04T23:00:00.000-08:00

Well this is a little late.

I tend to skirt away from the revelation of too much private personal information here and focus on cinema and other ephemera instead. But how to succinctly explain a post that was meant to go up on Christmas Eve being posted a couple of days after the New Year? I guess the truth. My wife is pregnant with our first child, two weeks ago she started having very strong contractions, being that she was 30 weeks pregnant at the time, we we’re fearful of a premature birth (37 weeks is when doctors officially consider a baby to be at full term), the contractions didn’t let up and she had to be admitted to a hospital and hooked up to an IV. Long story short, they finally subsided and she came home on New Year’s Eve under a strict bed rest instruction from the doctor.

But since I had already captured frames for this post before all this, I thought why wait until next Christmas when I will be a dad, and who knows where my head will be at.

As anyone who pays close attention here around the holidays may have noticed, my favorite seasonal movies tend not to be the routine celebratory stuff, but rather films that use the background of festive glee as the settings for mayhem. Some titles I tend to revisit on a semi-annual basis include Black Christmas, The Silent Partner, Die Hard, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and the subject of today’s post, Gremlins.

I’ve been watching Gremlins on a pretty much every other year basis (sometimes even more often) since I first saw it theatrically at the age of eight in 1984. While most films one sees and adores at that age tend to no longer hold interest (other than nostalgia) when the viewer reaches their mid-30’s, Joe Dante’s subversive genre bending film actually improves with age. Full of visual references to films and pop culture of Dante’s past (It’s A Wonderful Life, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Snow White, et cetera) and in jokes (an appearance of a Howling smiley face sticker, the names of the two films on the town’s theatre marquee being the working title of executive producer Steven Spielbergs’ Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.), Gremlins expertly balances a comedic tone with effective horror scenes that are actually still harrowing.

There’s also a lot going on beneath the surface in Gremlins as it depicts, with a toothful grinning satirical edge, the event toy (remember this was the era of Cabbage Patch Kids, Teddy Ruxpins and other hot items that led to many a brawl amongst "loving" parents), the films of Steven Spielberg (even while the man himself served as a watchful executive producer), the erosion of small towns in the Reagan era, the role of a stay at home mom (pay attention to the use of solely kitchen utensils and other signifiers of "domestication" as the tools of destruction when Mrs. Peltzer must ward off the gremlins) and even the facade of happiness some force upon themselves during the holiday season (in the infamous, and still shocking that they got away with it, reveal of how Kate learned the truth about Santa Claus).

So if you still think Gremlins is just a lark from your youth give it another shot one of these days and take a gander at these 24 selected shots from the film.

Posterized: Now Playing December 1981

2011-12-21T20:50:00.000-08:00

We've reached the end of the monthly Posterized feature for 1981 releases. And finality is a reoccurring similarity between many of the films released in December 1981. Though by no means do they represent the heights of their talents, amongst the films that opened are the final works of Billy Wilder, Henry Fonda, Andy Kaufman, John Belushi, Melvyn Douglas, Fred Astaire and Douglas Fairbanks Jr (the last three all in the same film).

Hope you are having a great holiday season, stay tuned for my 1981 Project wrap up in a few weeks, in the mean time expect the posts here to continue to be more of the image based variety.

Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981, Daniel Petrie)

2011-12-07T22:19:00.000-08:00

Part of the 1981 Project

A prototype for the police dramas that would proliferate in television (e.g. Hill Street Blues) shortly after its release, Fort Apache, The Bronxis a scattered drama focusing on the work and lives of a small precinct of police officers that addresses the relationship they have with the community, and how tenuous it is. It’s an ambitious if not fully realized film with a lot of social issues addressed and dramatic character events and decisions. Director Daniel Petrie and screenwriter Heywood Gould don’t always keep their juggled narrative balls from dropping to the ground and often favor cliché and underlining their point rather than a more realistic and subtle track. There is a lot to recommend though, beginning with a solid cast lead by Paul Newman and Ken Wahl, strengthened by good character actors in supporting roles (Ed Asner, Danny Aiello, Rachel Ticotin, Pam Grier, Paul Gleason and Dominic Chianese amongst other familiar faces) and the great location shooting in the South Bronx, which provided a great general ambience of late 70’s/early 80’s Bronx essence--destroyed rubble of old apartments, dilapated buildings, litter in every free space, and overall sense of post-apocalyptic dread.

Officer Murphy (Newman) is a veteran beat cop who can never leave his opinion to himself, which cost him a chance at a promotion long ago, his partner and friend Corelli (Wahl) has all the ambition and style that Murphy lacks, he wears leather jackets and you can imagine him as a version of Saturday Night Fever’s Tony Manero who grew up going to discos and had a Al Pacino/Serpico poster on his bedroom wall. They work at a precinct in the South Bronx that has been dubbed Fort Apache for the fact it’s considered the only safe haven for the non-criminal element of the neighborhood, which according to this film is a small percentage (similar to 1980’s Cruising which had an opening crawl explaining that the film is not a reflection of the entire gay community, Fort Apache’s crawl informs us that not everyone in the Bronx is a hardened criminal). Murphy and Corelli and the rest of the cops of Fort Apache seem to have an understanding relationship with the various miscreants in the area, yeah it’s okay to be a pimp, just don’t slap your prostitutes in the public’s eye or go ahead and do heroin, just try to buy good stuff that won’t lead to an OD, that sort of understanding. But two occurrences alter everything. First, a strung out prostitute (the still stunningly beautiful Pam Grier) is on a killing spree, which included a couple of rookie cops, all while the command of the station is being shifted from the exhausted and lax in rule enforcing Captain Dugan (Sully Boyar), who gets the film’s best written piece of dialogue with a David Mamet-esque rant about the lengths to which the system is broken, to the more serious and stat conscience eye of Captain Connelly (Asner). Connelly will not tolerate the existence of a cop killer in their borough and provides an incentive to his officers that leads to mass arrest, rioting citizens and cops using excessive force, including murder.

Overall I give the film a pass, but it’s frustrating because there’s a lot of promise that goes unfulfilled and the film easily gets distracted from its strengths. The film is based on the real life accounts of two police officers, and it seems like Petrie and Gould attempted to cram a lifetime of experience into a film that takes place over a couple of weeks. The murder of the two rookie cops is the impetus that drives much of the action of the film, however, for the importance it’s given, it’s pretty much forgotten about by the police department. Don’t get me wrong, I like its ultimate resolution (without giving too much away: the cops never solve the case), however, it just no longer seems to be a big deal, even to the Captain, despite bookending the film’s opening and closing scenes. It’s replaced with an awkward cop killing an innocent citizen subplot which is poorly executed and never compelling. Seeing how it came out the same year as Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City, an excellent film that dedicated nearly three hours to the emotional and personal strain that a cop revealing the corruption of a New York precinct goes through, Fort Apache’s meager depiction can’t help but feel lukewarm. Screenwriter Gould and director Petrie also apparently have no trust in either their two main actors (a shame since both Newman and Wahl do good work here) or the audience, and often have their cops explicitly state their objections, opinions and thoughts in the most obvious, exposition underlining manner possible.

My favorite scene occurs when the precinct methods shift sharply, and officers start arresting any suspicious person in their effort to catch the cop killers. The thin line of acceptance of certain misdemeanors evaporates and the citizens feel betrayed. In a scene that feels especially prescient in light of the interaction between police and protestors at the Occupy protests, an all-out riot clashes and the police quickly, and somewhat cathartically (for them) turn to excessive force, beating and hosing the protestor, many of whom were the same constituents who would loiter in front of the precinct. I wish the film would have spent more time focusing on this relationship between the cops and the bureau they police and the reality of their coexistence in one of the more economically devastated portions of the country instead of tackling too many “hot issues” like crooked cops and drug addiction.

Fort Apache performed well at the box office at a time when Paul Newman needed it. His last two films were box office disasters; the Robert Altman directed Quintet and the inane Irwin Allen late entry in the dying disaster film genre, the volcano based When Time Ran Out, a film so bad and in which the charismatic actor was such a non-entity, Newman issued an apology for his performance. Here he seems to be upping his world weariness, and accepting his age, something that would pay huge dividends through the rest of his career, including one of his career best performances only a year later in Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict. Paired with his acting idol Newman, Ken Wahl, displays an easy and affable presence, he would go on to be the lead in the influential television series Wiseguy, before an injury sustained in a motorcycle accident would cut his acting career short in the early 90s. The Bronx which saw certain neighborhoods lose up to 97% of their buildings to fire and abandonment in the 70’s and early 80’s, is still one of the poorest districts in the US, it’s the home to the New York Yankees, and the economic situation of this era gave birth to hip hop music.

Posterized: Now Playing November 1981

2011-11-30T19:45:00.000-08:00

Well after a solid daily schedule in October, I kind of shit the bed blogging wise here in November in terms of written posts, so keeping with that trend, let's close out the month of November with another poster based entry, this time focusing on the films released in the US in November 1981. Like this here blog, it was a paltry slate, though I recommend The Prowler for slasher fans, and Time Bandits is a favorite too.

Hope everyone had a happy holiday, hopefully your patience with me will be rewarded in the next few months. Thanks.

Posterized: Now Playing October 1981

2011-11-18T06:56:00.000-08:00

I know, I know, we're more than half way through November...but I never did this for last month due to my month long review of the horror cinema of 1981. Below are the poster for the films that opened in American cinemas thirty years and one month ago (many of which were featured in my 31 Days of '81 Horror celebration by the way).

31 Days of '81 Horror: Post-Script

2011-11-11T23:30:00.000-08:00

I am sorry this post is so late, but generally life busyness, bad internet issues (fuck you, AT & T), good sports (go Niners!), and a semi-self imposed blog sabbatical post Halloween lead this to be pushed to the back burner.

So, even though we are a third of the way through November, let's take one last longing look back at the horror film celebration of the last month. I would like to thank everyone who came by to read and comment here during my 31 Days of '81 Horror celebration. I came up with the idea in the early part of the year, and was glad that it was greeted with the enthusiasm that it was. While I love all genres of cinema, horror was the first that really got me excited about film, and while generally dismissed by the middlebrow mainstream film press, it endures as it's one of the few types of film that uses all the elements of filmmaking (sound, composition, editing) for effectiveness.

1981 was such a treasure trove for horror cinema that there were far more than 31 titles to choose from, some of the films that didn't make the list include Just Before Dawn (which I did watch and recommend), Night School (which was just released on DVD via the Warner Archives), Final Exam, Evilspeak (which I own a gray market bootleg of), Scream (not the Wes Craven version), and Evil Dead (though I think that's the date of it's original Michigan screening, and not the completed version which I believe was released theatrically in 1983).

As a way to wrap this all up in a neat tiny, blood soaked, ribbon, I present to you the list of films that I covered for 31 Days of '81 Horror in order of my favorite to my least favorite (each title is a link to my reviews of said films).

These following titles, I give high recommends to:

1. An American Werewolf in Paris

2. Road Games

3. Possession

4. The Howling

5. Scanners

These I give solid recommendations to, especially if you're a horror genre fan:

6. Friday the 13th part II

7. Bloody Birthday

8. The Burning

9. My Bloody Valentine

10. Eyes of a Stranger

11. Dead and Buried

The following films I recommend but with medium to major reservations:

12. Happy Birthday to Me

13. The Prowler

14. Dark Night of the Scarecrow

15. Galaxy of Terror

16. Hell Night

17. The Funhouse

18. Looker

19. Strange Behavior

20. The Hand

21. Nightmare

22. The Final Conflict

23. Halloween II

And these, well, let's say I only would recommend them if you're trying to watch 31 horror films from the year 1981 (but why would you do that, you're not crazy, right?)

24. The Nesting

25. Wolfen

26. Tattoo

27. Ghost Story

28. Deadly Blessing

29. Blood Beach

30. Fear No Evil

31. Graduation Day

31 Days of '81 Horror: Road Games (Richard Franklin)

2011-10-31T20:00:00.000-07:00

Australian director Richard Franklin was an ardent admirer of Alfred Hitchcock, so much so that as a USC film student he was able to get the master of suspense to speak to his class. Franklin, who would go on to direct Psycho II in 1983 (my review) was definitely an alert student, and his dedication shines through in the wonderful suspense yarn, Road Game, where he takes the basic premise of Rear Window and molds it into something his own. Pat Quid (Stacey Keach), an educated American hauling pork across the highways of Australia, witnesses suspicious behavior and letting his imagination run wild, suspects a traveller of murder. Pat picks up a beautiful American hitch-hiker (Jamie Lee Curtis) who he names, ahem, Hitch, and together the duo gets wrapped up in these “road games” of proving their theories correct. But in a classic turning of the screws, the voyeur is finding himself an unwilling participant in a deadly game with the murderer who has been carefully, with the help of Pat’s sometimes erratic behavior, casting all the evidence of foul play towards the American driver.

Provided a clever script by Everret DeRoche, solid acting by the entire ensemble, and great location scouting, Franklin skillfully plays with expectations and churns out suspense masterfully. The writer and director create a community amongst the drivers and passengers on the highway, and Franklin is able to balance the suspense with some humor, as the film is essentially a character study with a murder mystery as a backdrop. With the exception of a final jump out scare, the film is light on gore, making it stand out from the other brethren of 1981 horror films. But don’t let the lack of splatter fool you; Franklin proves a deft hand at a major shock midway through the film. Like Hitchcock, Franklin flexes some major stylistic flourishes, especially in three scenes: the opening murder set at a motel which uses heavy stark white lighting from the bathroom as illumination and giallo like close-up on gloves and body parts; an impressive 360 degree shot that starts with Stacey Keach in the driver’s seat of his rig out to the road he drives and back to him; and a prolonged suspenseful scene where Pat is inspecting his load after discovering the latch open, and he walks through the eerily hung bodies of pigs (or "tomorrow’s bacon" as Hitch writes on the back of the truck), his air visible through the cold of the refrigeration.

And now we must praise Stacey Keach. Not blessed with matinee idol looks and sporting a visible hair lip when not covered by a moustache, Keach nonetheless was lucky enough to come to prominence in the 1970s, where a man of his unique physical looks and abundant talent was in demand. In films as disparate as Fat City, The Killer Inside Me, The Gravy Train, The Ninth Configuration, The Long Riders and this, Keach was able to show his versatile ability to hone thoughtful dramatic performance with a touch of humorous self-weariness. While it’s difficult to select only one from his career, I feel like Pat Quid may be Keach’s most essential role. Acting for most of the film by himself or talking to his dingo, Keach is able to project a history of the character. His character’s simultaneous boredom and joie de vivre is apparent as he has mapped out various ways to keep himself occupied and entertained by such tactics as creating identities and history for the fellow road travelers. Sure, this is aided by a well written character, but even with a good script, we have to spend a lot of time with Pat, and Keach’s laconic pleasantness is a joy. Even the love angle with Jamie Lee Curtis (making one of her final six horror appearances between the years 1978 and 1981) is tender and the duo has instant chemistry, despite the large age difference.

An accomplishment for all involved, Road Games is one of the best horror/suspense films of 1981, and a great way to close out our 31 day celebration of the year’s crop.

31 Days of '81 Horror: Deadly Blessing (Wes Craven)

2011-10-30T20:00:00.000-07:00

There’s a reason that so many horror films are centered around religious iconography. Every religion, no matter how loose or strident, comes down to the basic tenant of using fear as a motivator. Do good and you will go to heaven to hang out with God and his hippie son Jesus with all your friends and loved ones; however be bad, or more appropriately, fail to fully follow the particular customs and rules of your particular sect, and go to hell where you will burn for eternity. More people are told these “facts” at a particularly young and impressionable age, far younger than an age when most start to watch horror films. A Mennonite community such as the Amish, with their rejection of modern technology, division from the rest of society and their uniform policy of dress (emphasis on black, with men sporting long beards) seems rife for exploiting by a horror filmmaker, but with the exception of this film, and Children of the Corn, I cannot think of another horror film set amongst the Mennonites. And after watching the amateurish, confused and mediocre Wes Craven directed film Deadly Blessing, I am still waiting for a good horror film set amongst the Mennonites.

John Schmidt (Jeff East) is a former member of an Amish like church called Hittites, led by Ernest Borgnine. Although he still lives on a property neighboring the Hittites’ camps and has a good relationship with much of his former flock, the elders are disgusted at John’s marriage to the secular hottie Martha (Maren Jensen), and believe the house is their rightful possession. The newlyweds also have to deal with Michael Berryman going around calling them “the incubus” all the time, but to be fair, Michael Berryman does that all the time anyway. Soon it becomes obvious that tactics are being taken to scare the Schmidts off the land, primarily the suspicious death of John. When two equally attractive friends of Martha (including a very young Sharon Stone) move in to console the mourning widow, efforts seem ramped up to get them out as the young women teach some Hittites’ males an unexpected lesson in sexuality.

Though by this point director Wes Craven had already created the influential duo of Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, and was a few years away from creating one of the two films he is now most associated with amongst the general public (A Nightmare on Elm Street, 1996’s Scream being the other), the amateurish and poor craftsmanship displayed in Deadly Blessing is a microcosm for his overall inconsistent career. It’s amazing to compare Craven to John Carpenter who steadily improved from a technical standpoint and cultivated his own cinematic identity in the same era. Sure, you could say Last House was never a technical feat, but at least he was able to churn suspense and turn stomach. But here there’s no suspense, and the indifferent style seems TV movie-ish (actually Dark Night of the Scarecrow, which did premiere on television is far more cinematic). There’s no tone or rhythm, and when things get supernatural, well, they just kind of happen, in fairness the confusing piecemeal script (credited to Glenn Benest, Matthew Barr and Craven) pays the director no assistance. Interestingly though, there are at least three shot compositions that feel like beta testing for scenes that Craven would later recycle for Elm Street, I guess he figured no one was watching or would remember Deadly Blessing. The most obvious of which is a bathtub sequence that is pretty much a frame for frame precursor to the famous scene with Heather Lagenkamp in Elm Street, only with a giant python in the place of Freddy Krueger’s knife glove.

31 Days of '81 Horror: Dead & Buried (Gary Sherman)

2011-10-29T20:00:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the small fog enshrouded beach town of Potter’s Bluff, where things are the way they used to be, even if the citizens have to kill for it. Sheriff Dan Gillis (James Farentino) who has returned with his wife (Flash Gordon’s Melody Anderson) to his childhood hometown is in charge of investigating a rash of suspicious fatal accidents befalling tourists. Gillis seems to continually hit dead end after dead end as most of the residents deny ever seeing the deceased persons and he just can’t get proper assistance from the town kooky perfectionist mortician William Dobbs (Jack Albertson), a nattily attired elderly man who still drives a model T. The further Gillis investigates, the closer he comes to unraveling the town’s morbid secret, and the more he puts himself at risk.

Director Gary Sherman, and a team of four writers including Alien scripter Dan O’Bannon provide a light horror tone reminiscent of a different era (apropos for the film’s theme) yet when things need to get to a dark or gory place, Dead and Buried is able to navigate those waters with ease, reminiscent of the tonal shifts in a future O’Bannon film, Return of the Living Dead. The central mystery is pretty easy to deduce (I won’t spoil it here though) but leads to a great “the protagonist is fucked” endgame, and I got a kick out of the theme of the ironic extremes that a small town would go to keep itself distant from the modern “element”. The film features early work by special effects wizard Stan Winston (The Terminator, Jurassic Park), which though effective from afar, reveal the small budget and greenness of Winston’s experience in close-up shots. Dead and Buried is a small gem worth checking out, just don’t make any vacation plans in Potter’s Bluff.

31 Days of '81 Horror: Galaxy of Terror (Bruce D. Clark)

2011-10-28T20:00:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I noticed that MAD magazine was still around, and that they were skewering the big release of the summer, The Dark Knight (I am assuming their parody was entitled “The Fart Knight”). The thing that got to me was this particular issue was coming out pretty much the same week as Christopher Nolan’s film. Knowing how deadlines work and how long it takes to write, ink and edit the piece, it occurred to me that this MAD piece was probably generated based on previews and other marketing tactics, whereas I know that in 1989, because I bought the issue, that their parody of Tim Burton’s film Batman (which I seem to recall was entitled “Blecchman”) came out in September, meaning, it was more likely the writers and artists actually had the opportunity to see the finish product that were satirizing beforehand, thus making their work more a response to the product than to the marketing. Now obviously the way information is disseminated these days requires a quick turnaround, and even a monster hit like The Dark Knight is probably gone from most cinemas three months’ after its release date, and is far enough removed from public consciousness that a MAD parody will feel stale, well more stale than usual for a MAD parody. Another example, and one that actually relates to the film being discussed today (yes, I’ll eventually provide some reviewing in this review) is the modern churner of direct to DVD rip-off releases of big blockbusters, Asylum Pictures. I should mention that I’ve never actually have seen one of their works in its entirety, but knowing what I know of their quality, I am going to take a stab that things like the Transmorphers series, and their hope that illiterate people grab this thinking that somehow they found a DVD of a film just released theatrically, aren’t exactly grand artistic achievements, or even try to be.

From the 1960’s to the 1980’s producer Roger Corman was the king of capitalizing on successful films of the day. Of course, back then successful films were not the manifest destinies they are today, so Corman and the filmmakers that worked for him had to wait to see which film audiences enjoyed. Thus, his “rip-offs” (for better lack of a word) were a response to their actual content and entailed a study of the film to see what made them work, a process that would take a few years generally. So Bonnie and Clyde (1967) begat Bloody Mama (1970), Jaws (1975) begat Piranha (1979), Star Wars (1977) begat Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), and yes, Alien (1979) begat Galaxy of Terror (1981).

Galaxy of Terror is basically Alien for those without an attention span, in fact the deliberate pacing of Ridley Scott’s film seem to be practically mocked when our captain Trantor (Grace Zabriskie) kicks off their crews mission to discover the whereabouts of a missing ship by kicking their shuttle into speeds so fast, it can only be visually implied with the actual film speeding up. The film packs as much disgusting space horrors: tentacles ripping off faces, body parts being torn off, faces exploding, even death via rape from a giant worm, as it can in its brief 81 minute running time, perhaps enough to equal the entire Alien series.

That’s of course not to say it’s anywhere in the class of Scott’s film, but unlike the previously mentioned Asylum production films, there was care put into making it a quality film. Even though it’s low budget surfaces during certain special effect sequences, a lot of attention was paid to the fine set design and matte paintings. The world created by the designers, which interestingly enough included future director of Aliens, James Cameron (another in the long tradition of Corman protégés that went on to bigger things), is a fog enshrouded, cavernous one, with a pyramid as the central force, and a very MC Escher vibe to the style. The practical effects of the tentacles can be very effectively skin crawling, especially when provided a good angle and darkness to hide the relative cheapness of them.

While the direction can be a little stiff at time, Bruce D. Clark is able to move things along at the breakneck pace clearly. The screenplay by Clark and Marc Siegler is a little heady and full of big announcements and platitudes for what is essentially a body count in space film, but I did love this one exchange: “Aren’t you afraid?” “No, I’m too scared to be” which enters the pantheon for ridiculous lines delivered with conviction along with such favorites as Road House’s “Pain don’t hurt”. A game cast includes Happy Days’ Joanie, Erin Moran, whose passing resemblance to Sigourney Weaver is actually subverted with her character’s fate, genre favorite Sid Haig, future Freddy Krueger Robert England, future softcore director Zalman King, and as the cook, Ray Walston, whose career would get a shot in the arm one year later, as Mr. Hand in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Galaxy of Terror is not a great film, but it’s a fun and obviously lovingly made B-movie, something that’s becoming more and more of a rarity these days.

31 Days of '81 Horror: The Nesting (Armand Weston)

2011-10-27T20:00:00.000-07:00

Horror novelist Laura Cochran (Robin Groves) is facing writer’s block and emotional instability in her New York neighborhood. She can’t leave the apartment without having nervous convulsion that her psychiatrist diagnoses as a case of agoraphobia. His recommendation is for her to get away from the big city (though that would seem a difficult task for an agoraphobic, but blah, logic) and she finds an old large abandoned and house in a small isolated lakeside town that she rents with the intention of fixing up. Shortly though, as is apt to happen in old large abandoned houses, especially one that we learn in the first sequence was the site of a post-World War II slaughter (the second 1981 horror film to open with murders involving homecoming WWII soldiers discussed here, the first being The Prowler), strange occurrences plague the writer. She has even more intense dreams, flashbacks of the houses past incarnation as a brothel, and visions of a faceless woman. What does the history of the house have to do with Laura? And why does it seem to manifest itself into terror to the ones that attempt to do her harm?

A case of decent parts adding up to a meh sum, The Nesting never really capitalizes on its potential. A haunted house story always leads to the inevitable suspension of disbelief in the viewer of why the person or persons doesn’t just leave (see Eddie Murphy’s routine about Amityville Horror in Delirious), however, with an agoraphobic lead character, the possibility for torment not only is more intense, but creates a self-writing character arc. Unfortunately, once she’s arrived in the new place, the agoraphobia issue is never again mentioned. The central resolution of the mystery is compelling, but that too is botched by just being revealed via an exposition heavy monologue (albeit by the awesome John Carradine) and a flashback that just serves as an addendum to the story instead of part of it. Director Armand Weston does a decent job, and there’s a good scythe to the face murder, but he mainly relies on old genre generic scare tactics like old phonographs playing themselves, windows shuttering and creaking hardwood floors. The central location is a scouting location coup though, and has great ambience, it would well serve a better film.

31 Days of '81 Horror: Dark Night of the Scarecrow (Frank DeFellitta)

2011-10-26T20:00:00.000-07:00

Pity to the simple minded giants in a horror movie for death or injury at the hands of a bloodthirsty mob is never far behind. Frankenstein’s monster just wanted some human companionship, but unable to process his full strength, he unexpectedly tossed a poor little girl to her death. In the made for TV, but surprisingly suspenseful and bloody, movie, Dark Night of the Scarecrow, slow witted child’s mind-in-a-man’s body, Bubba Ritter (Larry Drake), actually saves his young friend’s life, but is not sparred from the wrath of a small town gaggle of men, spurred on by voyeuristic, and possibly perverted minded, postal worker Otis Hazelrigg (Charles Durning).

Bubba’s best friend, a ten year old flower obsessed girl named Mary Lee decides to take a peak over the fence of a neighbor’s yard, but before we can cutaway to ominous looking gnomes, a German Shepard pounces on her. Bubba brings the unconscious child to her mother, but wires are crossed, and Otis, thinking that there’s no other explanation than Bubba must have finally snapped, gathers a posse to implement a little small town justice. Scared, Bubba, at the insistence of his mother, hides from the men, in their field, disguised as a scarecrow. But the posse discovers the ruse and kills Bubba, shooting first and asking questions later. Planting a pitchfork on Bubba, the men get off of murder charges by claiming a self-defense plea. Shortly after, the men responsible for Bubba’s death have scarecrows mysteriously appear in their own yards and are systemically killed. Is this the work of Bubba’s mother? The D.A. who swears for justice? Or has Bubba returned from the dead?

While a little padded for the simple nature of the film (probably to fit a 2 hour block of time with commercials), and prone to the occasional disinterested shot composition and technical aspects that one generally associates with the made for television films of the era, Dark Night also is very effective, both emotionally and suspense wise. The film was originally conceived to be made independently and then sold for theatrical release, so while some scenes of gore may have been edited for broadcast, it still has its share of bloodshed, and is more suspense than gore based either way. The scene where Bubba’s disguise is revealed is particularly harrowing and well executed. I would have liked one of the members of the posse to have misgivings about their participation, but really appreciated Durning’s, reveling in playing the villain, Otis becoming more power hungry and obsessive after getting away with murder. The film serves as a prototype for the Final Destination series, as it keeps the source of the mystery ambiguous, and each person dies in a Rube Goldberg-inspired method that could be explained away easily via circumstances.

31 Days of '81 Horror: Ghost Story (John Irvin)

2011-10-25T20:00:00.000-07:00

The premise of Ghost Story, four elderly men with a macabre secret from their past who meet weekly as the Chowder Society, where they tell one another scary stories is rife with potential for evocative subtext leaden spectral vengeance. Does this fifty year old practice really serve as a sort of coping mechanism for their guilty consciousness? Or is it possible subconscious self-punishment? And what happens when the spirits set their sights on the offspring of the Chowder Society members? Perhaps Peter Straub’s bestselling 560 page novel delves into these aspects…or at least is a compelling narrative, because unfortunately, the film adaptation bungles the promising premise and is a tonal mess and a bit of a dirge.

Director John Irvin, who did a fine job with the exciting mercenary film Dogs of War (my review) which was released in February of 1981, and screenwriter Lawrence Cohen (not too be confused with It’s Alive b-movie auteur Larry Cohen), certainly have some high ambitions for the film: dream sequences, long flashback sequences and no strict leading characters, that give it a more novelistic approach than a straight three act structure, but it feels like too much was condensed from the novel to fit a just under two hour running time, resulting in a film that feels too short for its ambitions, but too long for what it actually is. The film opens with an effective sequence showing the four elderly leads (Fred Astaire, John Houseman, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, and Melvyn Douglas) being shaken from their sleep, set to an effectively eerie score by composer Phillipe Sarde. The film has nice snowy atmosphere, but Irvin has no feel for manufacturing thrills or working with special effects, diminishing what should be the film’s strongest moments. From there on, most of the scare tactics are juvenile jump scares and ineffective.

The other major flaw is the film’s schizophrenic tone. A major marketing of the film was the assembled cast from Hollywood’s past, but what’s not accounted for is that with the exception of Douglas none of the foursome is exactly known for their horror chops (though Houseman appeared in 1980’s The Fog and Douglas in The Changeling), and only Houseman actually seems particularly interested in the genre at this point. And sexuality is a major component for a movie starring several elderly people; hopefully the audience who grew up watching Astaire films appreciated their glimpses at a full frontal Craig Wasson!

31 Days of '81 Horror: Blood Beach (Jeffrey Bloom)

2011-10-24T20:00:00.000-07:00

Thirty years later and that poster and its tagline (“Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, you can’t get to it!”—a riff on the famous Jaws 2 marketing) is still indelible for genre fans. Unfortunately, it appears the poster was conceived first, probably by legendary exploitation market producer Jerry Gross (Teenage Mother, I Drink Your Blood), and the film second, since both that image as well as the tagline are recreated on screen (John Saxon gets the pleasure of reciting that line!)

Blood Beach combines elements from both the burgeoning slasher genre as well as the more classic 1950s era monster movie tropes and transplants them to a beach setting. A quiet community (played by Santa Monica) is shocked as residents seemingly vanish in thin air while on the beach. The effect of sand sucking people into it is pretty good considering the low budget of the film, though each victim seems to have a completely different injuries resulting via the sand monster that range from disappearing entirely, getting decapitated, the rapist who gets his dick torn off, and most heinous of all, the teenage girl whose legs get all scratched up!!!

The problem is that the set pieces are either very short or we just witness the aftermath, and for the rest of the running time we are stuck with long stretches comprised solely of the lame “witty banter” of cops Saxon, Otis Young and Burt Young and the budding rekindled romance of the bland lifeguard lead (David Huffman) and his old flame (Marianna Hill). When the “exciting” moments do occur on screen, they are over quickly and sans any sense of suspense or atmosphere from director Jeffrey Bloom (Flowers in the Attic). Spoiler alert: the monster perpetrating these acts looks like an artichoke.

31 Days of '81 Horror: The Funhouse (Tobe Hooper)

2011-10-23T20:00:00.000-07:00

I’ve gathered from some of my perusal of reviews online that The Funhouse is not the most highly regarded horror film of 1981, which is probably due to the fact that the film is pretty back loaded; there’s not a killing until about the fifty-five minute mark, and even the titular funhouse is not visited until ten minutes prior to that. Additionally, save for the enchanting Elizabeth Berridge (probably best known for her role as Mozart’s wife in Amadeus) as the virginal (though frequently topless) suburban girl next door, the other three lead characters and performers are obnoxious and indistinct, which come to think of it are issues one could raise with Hooper’s seminal Texas Chain Saw Massacre, to which this film resembles the closest out of all in the director’s oeuvre (I’d argue even more so than Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2.)

What enjoyment I did garner from the film in the non-horror sections were Hooper’s keen eye for the suburban milieu of the early 1980’s (something he would exploit to even further lengths in his next film, Poltergeist) and the loving care and detail given to the ramshackle carnival and the societal outcasts that operate it (including DePalma favorite William Finley as a possibly demented magician). The rickety well-trodden yet temporal nature of the structures, the slightly askew and older faces of the carnies (and freak show animals!) and the sinister sheen of the rides’ animatronics give the film an eerie atmosphere, that frankly I found more effective than any suspense Hooper is able to churn once the film becomes a routine, yet oddly blood and goreless (the MPAA’s work?) body count slasher picture.

Hooper subtly and slyly comments on the changing landscape of fear and entertainment, and how something quaint like a hand built funhouse seem to youths such as the protagonists when compared to modern horror films. Like Massacre, there’s also a twisted display of family, and Hooper contrasts the killer with the “normal kids” of whom he shares a sexual immaturity and penchant for wearing Frankenstein monster masks.

31 Days of '81 Horror: Scary Places

2011-10-23T15:00:00.000-07:00

Tonight, we kick off the final week of our celebration of horror films from 1981 with the last category of the month, this time our focus will be on films centered around spooky locations.

Throughout the course of the next days we will visit haunted houses, carnivals, cornfields, and the highways of Australia. Please read from the safety of your own home.

31 Days of '81 Horror: The Hand (Oliver Stone)

2011-10-22T20:00:00.000-07:00

Jon Lansdale (Michael Caine) appears to have it all: a successful comic strip, a beautiful wife, a devoted child, a beautiful home in Vermont, all of his appendages. Jon’s comic strip is a Robert E. Howard Conan like barbarian, with a very maculine world view, which is obviously how Jon views himself. However, the cracks in that veneer are quickly exposed when his wife reveals she wants to move back to New York, to you know, find herself. Jon’s not having any of it, and in a tense car ride home in a swerving one lane highway, a heated argument leads to an auto accident that finds him quickly separated from his “drawing” hand. The hand is never actually found, and immediately, his life begins to fall apart, despite getting a cool new robotic hand. He can no longer produce his beloved strip and his agent wants to replace him with an arty intellectual (Charles Fleischer, Roger Rabbit himself) who wants to make his hero more introspective and weak, his wife is having an affair with her yoga instructor and the only job he can procure is at a City college in a small mountain town in California where not one of his students can name a comic strip they actually read.

He also begins to have visions of his missing hand-shot in eerie black and white which has a gothic Universal horror look, a Grand Guignol style that is a nice contrast to the more basic visual style of the rest of the film, haunting his dreams, and making him lose control of his emotions. Soon his enemies: a homeless man (played by director Oliver Stone) who assaults him, the cute co-ed who is having an non-exclusive affair with him and a psychology professor at the school who is on to him, are dispersed one by one in gorier and gorier fashion. Has his haunted appendage taken a life of his own that manifest itself into action at the darker impulses of Jon? Or is Jon really off his rocker?

Michael Caine, his hair curly and long, which causes him to resemble Gene Wilder when his character gets more ragged, is an interesting choice as the modern man with a more Neanderthal view of himself which is nowhere close to the reality. One would think someone like Burt Reynolds or Clint Eastwood would have been the obvious choice over the more cerebral Brit actor, but the choice of Caine is intriguing because it takes little convincing that he’s really cuckolded. This was filmed during a streak of two other horror films for the actor (1980’s The Island and Dressed to Kill) and at a point where Caine was freely admitting to doing work for the pay (and additions to his house) more than for their quality, although Dressed to Kill is awesome (and my 4th favorite film of 1980). Caine seems a bit bored during the more melodramatic moments, but fully embraces Jon’s descent into madness.

Never one to be fond of subtlety, even when he became the premier director of hot button issue dramas that were Academy Award fodder in the latter half of the decade (Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July) director Oliver Stone feels a bit constrained here. Sure just reading the plot synopsis gives you a sense that everything is pretty off-the-wall, and Stone is not afraid to embrace some of the more fantastic elements of the script, it’s just missing an extra oomph, as if Stone struggled whether to explore the project from a serious minded or exploitative vantage point. The result is in someone in the middle, making for an enjoyable, if overlong, film with some salient thematic depth, but one that had the making of something more insane, and intriguing, lurking in its, pardon the pun, grasp.

31 Days of '81 Horror: Scanners (David Cronenberg)

2011-10-21T20:00:00.001-07:00

When you think of the expression “body horror” in relation to cinema, one man’s name probably comes to the forefront of your mind, Canadian writer-director David Cronenberg. With the exception of his funny car racing film Fast Company, Cronenberg specialized exclusively from his feature debut, Shivers, in 1975 to 1988’s Dead Ringers in brainy horror films that dealt with the effects of altered, modified or mutated human bodies as the source of the terror. Unlike his first three horror films (Shivers, Rabid and The Brood), the horror in the human structure in Scanners is not transmitted or manifested sexually, but via the mind.

Mixing action, suspense, some gallows humor, technology and yes, a great head explosion, Cronenberg crafts a world, not so different than ours, where a select few people carry a genetic imprint that grants them telepathic capabilities and the ability to control minds. The more advanced of these scanners can communicate with computers and alter infrastructure or even transmit enough energy to cause the aforementioned head explosion. Taking an approach that would be applied in the X-Men films, the scanners seem to see the burden of their mutation as something of a crutch that leads them to sever ties to the human race, often times after causing harm to themselves in a vain attempt to be “normal’, with the exception of one evil renegade scanner mastermind, who we know is evil because he’s played by Michael fucking Ironside, who is assassinating scanners and injecting newborns with the drug that causes the abnormality in an attempt to create an army of scanners at his beck and call for eventual world domination. The only hope for salvation rests in the hands of a troubled mysterious homeless man, Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) who learns how to harness his powers from a scientist that spearheaded the scanner program (Patrick McGoohan) who shares a secret past relationship with Cameron.

With aplomb, director David Cronenberg makes Scanners his most ambitious film to date. He creates a futuristic world that is large in scope (if limited in geography) with a naturally lived in quality. While his budget may have been small, he makes the limited resources work in his favor by having many of the major moments set in offices and board rooms, aiding the corporate infested vision of the future. And when there is a big chase scene, he proves a deft director of action sequences. Dick Smith’s make up effects team does a tremendous job throughout, but especially in the final body melting confrontation between Ironside and Lack; and frequent Cronenberg collaborator Howard Shore provides a synthesizer based score that is eerie and matches the coldness of the characters and the locations.

Until his next film, Videodrome, David Cronenberg never was gifted with, let’s say an "accomplished", actor in the leading protagonist role. That is certainly the case here with Stephen Lack. Wooden and emotionless to the extreme, his performance was always the sticking point keeping myself from fully embracing the film. I am not sure if it took multiple viewings to get this, or if I am just a fool, but this time around I saw Lack’s awkward inhuman performance as being conceived as such, he is a character who knows little about himself or the human race after all. Lack’s distant nature also serves as a nice complimentary extreme separation between his paternal doctor (McGoohan chewing scenery left and right) and his main advisory, the gleefully sadistic and fatalistic Michael Ironside.

31 Days of '81 Horror: Strange Behavior (Michael Laughlin)

2011-10-20T20:00:00.000-07:00

A curio that lives up to the adjective in its title, Strange Behavior is a New Zealand shot film, though set in an American Midwestern suburb, that combines the slasher genre craze of the late 1970s/early 1980s with a 50’s sci-fi B-movie structure and a slight comic edge. The resulting film doesn’t always meld together perfectly, and its large ambition is hampered by the small budget and relative inexperience of director Michael Laughlin, making his directing debut, but it’s usually interesting.

John Brady (Michael Murphy) is a widowed detective in a small college town who begins investigating the death of his son’s classmates, which leads him to a fantastical laboratory performing experiments on humans turning them into killing machines. Starting off rather slowly, the film begins to take some unique and unexpected turns as the plot thickens.

The script was written by director Laughlin and future Academy Award nominee Bill Condon. Condon who would spend a good decade and a half toiling in genre fare before eventually became an Oscar favorite with 1998’s Gods and Monsters, a biopic covering the life and death of eccentric Frankenstein director James Whale, which he followed up with the biopic Kinsey and the Broadway adaptation, Dreamgirls (he’s also directing the final Twilight films). I’m guessing Condon is responsible for some of Strange Behavior’s more off-kilter, and endearing, touches, such as the homoerotic nature of some of the killings (all the victims are male), mad scientist characters that recollect the heyday of Universal Horror (such as Bride of Frankenstein’s Dr. Pretorius, directed by Whale) and a house party that at one point busts out in a fully choreographed dance routine! Tangerine Dream, who also provided the soundtrack for another 1981 film, Michael Mann’s Thief, provides the dreamy, but not quite as memorable as some of the other’s score.

31 Days of '81 Horror: Looker (Michael Crichton)

2011-10-19T20:00:00.000-07:00

Like Westworld before and Jurassic Park after, Looker is a Michael Crichton conceived (he wrote and directed the film) adventure thriller concerning the price one pays for the pursuit of perfection. But instead of focus on recreating the Wild West with robots or splicing DNA to resurrect dinosaurs, the focus here is the prescient study of modifying one’s appearance to the vague concept of flawlessness.

Dr. Larry Roberts (Albert Finney) is a playboy Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who discovers a conspiracy when investigating the death of several of his patients, all actresses and models, that leads him to a shadowy organization (aren’t they all?) lead by John Reston (James Coburn), whose next target is commercial actress and potential Dr. Roberts’ love interest Cindy Fairmont (Susan Dey).

While the investigation of the themes surrounding the possible horrific ramifications of perfecting one’s body Looker offers are only skin deep (har har) and never as probing or reaching as David Cronenberg’s work, it still has its share of ridiculous fun moments. Chiefly amongst these are a ray gun that enables the target unconscious, and waking in another time and space, which is liberally (and quite frankly inconsistently) used to great effect, especially in a car chase between Finney and 80’s henchman favorite Tim Rossovich (succinctly and appropriately credited as “Moustache Man”). The conclusion also is a blast, with an almost Looney Tunes level of inspired zaniness involving a chase through videos of commercials. Crichton employed actual television commercial directors of the era to craft realistic reproductions of their work.

31 Days of '81 Horror: Tattoo (Bob Brooks)

2011-10-18T20:00:00.000-07:00

In the opening of Tattoo, Karl Kinsky, a soldier on vacation in Japan (Bruce Dern) witnesses a ceremonial ritual featuring full body tattooed men in sumo loincloths and is instantly transfixed. Upon returning to the United States, specifically Hoboken, New Jersey, Kinksy, an obsessive personality, has replicated the tattoos on his body and has become an in demand tattoo artist. The permanence of the art form leaves an indelible mark on Kinsky, whose relationships with other people, including his family, are fleeting and shallow. That is until his infatuation with a model, Maddy (Maude Adams), comes to fruition when he’s hired to paint tattoos on her for a photo shoot. But then his obsessiveness takes hold.

First and only time director Bob Brooks probably envisioned this as a similar take on obsessive psychosis to Taxi Driver, and character actor extraordinaire Bruce Dern is definitely capable of such a performance; however it is just a rote variation of the fill-in-the-blank from hell thriller that Play Misty for Me made famous. While I appreciate a film that doesn’t provide all the details, I still wonder what specifically about the Maude Adams character Dern found so fascinating other than her beauty, which seems like the exact superficiality that he rejects. Consequently, after a disastrous dinner at the restaurant I also struggled to accept that Adams’ strung him along for as long as she did before finally severing ties with him, other than the plot called for it.

With all that said, things do pick up in the final act when Kinsky’s possessive instincts lead to a kidnapping. The film finally reaches the uncomfortable tension that had been building up as Kinsky rapes his infatuation’s skin not through sexual penetration but through the act of tattooing her entire body against her will. The film hints at a surprising turn of events until ultimately returning to the familiar generic thriller beats.

31 Days of '81 Horror: Possession (Andrez Zuwalski)

2011-10-17T22:00:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the most atypical movie to be discussed this month (but we’ll see), this is one film where the madness and insanity contained within it extends outwardly and affects the viewer. Employing frequent use of hypnotic roaming long shots and disorienting compositions and editing that moves time and space without any forewarning, Andrez Zuwalski’s Possession uses the form of cinema to put us in its character’s state of mind as they crumble to psychotic results.

Combining horror/science fiction tropes and the confines of Germany under Communist rule with the looming Berlin Wall as a key visual metaphor, Zulawski’s singular vision explores the emotional violence and visceral effects of divorce, ultimately positing the question: could an alien species be any worse than us humans? Or at least that’s one interpretation I deduced, it’s an ambiguous and sometimes impenetrable (though always intriguing) film.

Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill give performance turned up to eleven that would probably make Nicolas Cage blush and say “that’s maybe a skooch too much guys” but work perfectly within the film’s parameters. They are, pardon the pun, truly possessed.

31 Days of '81 Horror: Body Horror

2011-10-17T18:36:00.000-07:00

Our bodies are our temples. But our temples are pretty gross. Feces, spit, vomit, urine, mucus, phlegm, and blood are just a small sample of the disgusting excretion we all perform on a daily basis. We like to keep our bodies in shape, healthy and free from germs, so when a movie can effectively exploit the possible lack of control over our physical being, it can cause an instinctive discomfort that we feel internally.

Over the next few days, we will be spending some time exploring body horror. Vomit bags sold separately.

31 Days of '81 Horror: Halloween II (Rick Rosenthal)

2011-10-16T20:00:00.000-07:00

Look guys, life is sometimes too short to rewatch a movie you’ve seen several times before and think is merely “okay”, especially when you are reviewing 30 other horror film from one particular year, so today’s entry is a bit of a cheat, as I reprint my thoughts on Rick Rosenthal’s sequel, Halloween II from October 30th, 2009. I feel it’s too big of a title to ignore in this celebration of all that was horror cinema in 1981, especially since so many of my reviews reference the influence (and high quality) of Carpenter’s original. I also figured most readers didn’t see this the first time I posted it, and if they did, it’s been two years; why not give it another read?

Two points of interest: 1.) This was conceived as a bulletin point post where I listed the Good, the Bad and the Ugly aspects of the film instead of a cohesive review, that method is restored here. 2.) I make a lot of references to the then newly released Rob Zombie film of the same name, which I had provided a similar breakdown of the day before this piece was originally posted. If you’d like to read that first to get all the references, then click here.

Spoilers, ye be warned

The Good:

-I think what appeals to most viewers, and me too, at least to the extent I had considered this a genuinely "good" film until recently, is that it takes place almost literally the second after the original ended. While the film ultimately doesn't work as a whole, the gimmick of making the first two films take place over the course of the entire day, or at least once Laurie Strode's character is introduced, plays into various what then? questions or theories viewers might have formulated after constant reviewing and analyzing of the first film.

-Most of the characters (and actors) from the first film return, which other than obviously Donald Pleasance and Jamie Lee Curtis, means that Charles Cyphers is back as Sheriff Brackett as is Nancy Loomis in a cameo as his deceased daughter, Annie. Brackett seeing his murdered daughter provides some weight to the proceedings and a scene we rarely see in slasher movies, the parent coping with the death of their teenage child. We also learn the fate of Laurie's crush Ben Tramer.

-This is the movie where Donald Pleasance lets his ham freak fly, he's great here and increases Loomis' obsessive relationship to his former patient. Plus he gets a wonderful line at the beginning where stewing over losing Myers, an awakened by the racket neighbor tells him to quiet down because "I've been Trick Or Treated to death tonight" to which he impudently replies "You don't know what death is!" Cue the famous Carpenter score and opening credits. This is the best moment of the film.

-While I find Dick Warlock's portrayal of "The Shape" severely lacking, there's a wonderful moment where he finally gets Laurie within his sights and he just walks through a glass door without pause. It's the only time Warlock approaches the conviction of Nick Castle's original performance.

-The final shots of the film: Laurie being taken from one hospital after surviving a night of horrors to god knows where with an expression of complete blankness on her face. She finally has a moment's pause to reflect on what just happened in the last 12 or so hours...CUT TO...Myers on fire, his mask in flames...FADE OUT...end of film. This is more unsettling than anything in either of the "trying too hard to be unsettling" Zombie films.

The Bad:

-While most of the surviving cast returns, what happened to the kids, Lindsay and Tommy? I realize that the actors would have looked the most different of all the cast in the three year gap between films, and thus would not be able to reprise their roles, but recast or at least a mention of them would be appreciated.

-Speaking of missing cast members, don't you think the Strodes would want to visit their daughter in the hospital, even if she is (and we'll get to this in the Ugly section) "adopted".

-The first film features a body count of five, but over the course of Halloween night, only three. The sequel really amps up the number of killings, a pardon the pun, stab at, ironically enough, keeping pace with the Halloween slasher film imitators that popped up with great frequency after the originals success. It seems like Myers goes out of his way to kill people here, with none of the watching or premeditation that the original film established.

-Speaking of killing, and again this was probably a response to the imitators, Myers uses a plethora of weapons in II whereas in the original he uses either a knife (a phallic extension) or his hands. I prefer the more primal Myers over the hot tub dunking one.

-The first Halloween has atmosphere and is scary, Friday the 13ths and other imitators ramped up the gore, Halloween II exists somewhere between, trying to emulate the originals suspense but without the assured pacing of Carpenter's film while trying to up the gore quotient. In that regards it fails to reach the heights of the work of someone like Tom Savini. The result is a film that's neither scary nor gory. According to IMDB, which is not all that reliable (at least two of the trivia bits they state for the film are false), Carpenter added the gore scenes after shooting, which makes sense as they feel like an afterthought.

-Too many fake jump scares, yeah the first film has it's share, but here it's a crutch that is relied on too much. Example: a cat jumps out from a previously closed dumpster, a minute or so after it's already been opened to provide a "shock"

-For the most part they recycle the original theme, which I am fine with, it's the same night, the theme is iconic, why not? But they add little flourishes (not sure if this was Alan Howarth's contribution, he's listed as a second composer in the credits) which are distracting for those like myself who are intimately familiar with the original score.

-Am I missing something, why is everyone constantly blaming Loomis for Myers' escape. Was he responsible for security at the Haddonfield Mental Hospital? Loomis was the only one who was prepared for his return and he did plug a chamber's worth of bullets into him. It's not his fault Myers escaped and is virtually unkillable. Lay off the guy.

The Ugly:

-Like I said before, Nick Castle had a deliberateness and grace in his portrayal of Myers that Dick Warlock just doesn't possess, we don't see the voyeuristic aspects of Myers here, he pops up, jumps from out of nowhere, it is what it ultimately is, a stunt man doing stunts, not an actor giving a performance.

-The direction. What better way to compare a visionary director to an anonymous one than watching Halloween and part II back to back, granted as a producer Carpenter probably oversaw a lot of the production (which would have been right smack between Escape From New York and The Thing), but there's no pacing, the deliberate nature of the first film is completely gone leaving us with a hurry up and get this done with tempo, the shot compositions are lazy (even with cinematographer Dean Cundey returning), the film suffers from bad editing and most of all, it just is not suspenseful. In Rosenthal's defense, the script, by original Halloween scribes Carpenter and Debra Hill is no great shakes.

-The Sister thing. The twist that effectively killed the mystery and much of thematic elements of the first film and gave Myers, who originally embodied unclassifiable evil, a lame and simple purpose. He was no longer "The Shape" or "The Boogeyman" he became "The dude who wants to kill his sisters". John Carpenter himself even dismisses this addition as a gimmick, put in to capitalize on the Luke Skywalker-Darth Vader paternal relationship in Empire Strikes Back. What's worse, is there's no thought put into it, and only 2 scenes that mention the sister-brother link, a fuzzy focus flashback that Laurie has in the midst of her hospital recuperation (because that's when I always randomly recall the one time my mother told me I was adopted and then took me to meet my mute murderous older brother) and when Loomis' doctor pal, Dr. Exposition, er, Marion, informs Loomis of the familial connection. I would appreciate someone doing a fan edit of the film and remove those scenes, even if it wouldn't completely redeem the film. What's most upsetting is that everyone takes Laurie and Michael's relationship to be canonical, Rob Zombie who claimed that he either hated or never saw the sequels made it a major factor of his two films and I even have friends who are convinced the baby sister is seen at some point in the first scenes of the original film. FYI: She's not.

In conclusion, if you must see a movie named Halloween II, definitely make it the 1981 Rick Rosenthal directed film. But your best bet is sticking with Carpenter's original or the Myers-less Halloween III: Season of the Witch.

31 Days of '81 Horror: Happy Birthday to Me (J. Lee Thompson)

2011-10-15T20:00:00.000-07:00

Though Happy Birthday to Me doesn’t quite live up to the poster’s hyperbolic promise of “six of the most bizarre murders you’ll ever seen”, mainly due to MPAA’s strident editing of violence from slasher movies in the decade, it does deserves some props for featuring murder scenes whose methodology is more inventive than your typical butcher knife or machete slaying. And yes, someone does get a shish kebab shoved through their mouth. And if you have ever experienced any scarf related trauma, this is definitely not the film for you.

While featuring the typical cast of co-eds as potential fodder, including the nerd, the shy girl, the smart ass, and a new favorite rarity, the French jock, as well as the typical Ten Little Indians mystery and giallo flashback structure so favored by the slasher genre of the era, it does differ in a few respects. Instead of some inexperienced but hungry young buck behind the camera, J. Lee Thompson (Guns of the Navarone, the original Cape Fear, several Charles Bronson’s 70’s/80 ‘s programmers), who was the ripe age of 67 when the film was released, directs. The film also gives a significant role to 50’s film noir mainstay and Pa Kent in the 1978 film, Superman, Glen Ford, was developed and released via a major studio (versus being merely distributed a la the first Friday the 13th film), and at an hour and fifty minutes, runs a good twenty minutes longer than its many counterparts.

Ultimately the extended running time is felt early, as it slogs along slowly. Part of the problem is that though we spend a longer amount of time with the murder fodder, they are still barely distinguishable from one another save for the main lead, Virginia (Melissa Sue Anderson) and future character actor Matt Craven. In an attempt to conceal the identity of the killer, Thompson and screenwriters John CW Saxton, Peter Jobin and Timothy Bond, go to unintentionally comic lengths to draw suspicion on everyone (including having a character have a life like severed head he crafted sitting on a dish with red paint below!). The flashbacks to a past traumatic event in Virginia’s life are handled very well, intriguing us just right with bits and pieces to keep us tantalized before the final reveal. The film really picks up in the last act, and blazes towards a twisted conclusion. Unfortunately, not knowing when to stop, a final twist was added late in the game, and seeing how it was probably conceived in the shooting stage, it feels tacked on and weakens some of the impact of the otherwise awesome conclusion

31 Days of '81 Horror: My Bloody Valentine (George Mihalka)

2011-10-14T20:00:00.000-07:00

Though risking being scoffed at for comparing a high art to a low one, I’d like to suggest that in many ways, the slasher films of 1981 were similar to a jazz recording. There’s a formula, and while we will always laud those that successfully break free from that formula to create a unique masterpiece, we should also appreciate those who play the notes really well. Fail in your execution though and you can turn an enduring Miles Davis classic into elevator muzak, but succeed and even a catchy show tune like “My Favorite Thing” can be turned into an elegiac wonder by the likes of a master like John Coltrane. The Canadian produced film, My Bloody Valentine, does not reinvent the wheel, nor does it transcend the genre. It’s a holiday set slasher with all the earmarks (past horrors haunting present, subjective POV shots, etc), but director George Milhaka hits the chords well, and provides enough interesting elements to the result of a film that still draws interest (a famous band named after it, a recent 3-D remake) thirty years later.

Twenty years ago, on the night of the annual community Valentine Day Dance, the small mining town of Valentine’s Bluff, suffered a methane gas explosion that killed many miners while the supervisors partied away. The sole survivor, who became a cannibalistic madman, Harry Warden, killed the neglectful supervisors and vowed to come back each year and wreak vengeance unless the dance was cancelled outright. And for twenty years, the small town heeded his warning, but a new generation wants to reestablish the tradition. But Harry Warden seems to be a man of his word as he sends warning by leaving the sheriff a heart shaped box full not of chocolates, but actually human hearts of new victims.

The working class blue collar nature of the environment and the workers, mostly in their thirties, is a welcome respite from the usual assortment of teenagers (or thirty something year olds playing teenagers) that served as fodder in these type of films. I like that the sheriff actually was proactive in cancelling the dance unlike the insensitive authority figures we’re used to seeing, but alas, these hardworking miners want to party and drink their Stroh’s and Mooseheads and through an impromptu celebration regardless. Mihalka is able to milk a lot of extra tension from the setting, especially in the final chase, when the darkness and claustrophobia of the mine becomes another obstacle in escaping the killer, something that was, pardoned the pun, mined successfully in Neil Marshall’s 2006 cave set horror film The Descent.

The MPAA made the producers cut three and a half minutes of gore footage to obtain the necessary R rating, which, if you will allow another music metaphor, is like asking a guitarist to function with one string missing from their instrument. While the film in its R rating still works, as Mihalka utilizes suspense tactics well, it’s a bit of a jarring experience, with certain characters death scenes completely removed. Lionsgate released a DVD with all cut footage intact a few years ago, which I used for my revisit for this review. The extra footage had not been color corrected, so it was quite easy to recognize the removed scenes. John Carpenter proved that you don’t need to have excessive gore for a successful and frightening slasher film, but that was an artistic decision, and My Bloody Valentine was made with the intention of having these grandiose murder sequences, so it was nice to see the hard work of makeup effects artist Thomas R. Burman finally inserted properly. The added footage includes face scolding, pick axes and what would be the result of placing a human in an industrial dryer for several hours, besides being “cool” scenes; it clears up the fate of everyone. If you’ve only seen the edited version, I highly recommend revisiting the film in its unrated cut!

31 Days of Horror: Friday the 13th part II (Steve Miner)

2011-10-13T20:00:00.000-07:00

In the pre-credit sequence of the first of what would be ten sequels to the original Friday the 13th (1980, Sean S. Cunnigham), Alice (Adrienne King), the sole survivor of the slaughter at Camp Crystal Lake and responsible party of the removal of Mrs. Voorhees' head, is stalked and murdered by the drowned son of Mrs. Voorhees, Jason. It's that kind of byzantine logic, or perhaps complete and utter lack of adherence to any logic is more appropriate, that would become par for the course for a series which would see the size and location of Crystal Lake alter on a film by film basis, the resurrection of its killer time and again, and even, a trip to space.

Five years after the events of the first film, psych major Ginny (Amy Steele) is amongst a group of new counselors to the campground neighboring Crystal Lake, who not too long after arriving begin being picked off by an at first unseen killer (keeping the structure of the original film) who's later reveal to be Jason, here sans iconic hockey mask (he would get that in the next film), favoring instead the hillbilly survivalist chic fashion of crusty overalls and burlap sac with one eye hole, and one must really give the old guy credit for accuracy with such a limited view. Ginny is the strongest of the series "final girls or guys". As portrayed by Steele, she is funny, sexy and smart, and for once, somebody actually gets some use out of a psychology degree as she relies on it and her knowledge of the folklore to completely fuck with Jason's head. While playing the mindless killer Jason is by no means an acting coup, stuntmen Warrington Gillette and Steven Dash, who both shared the honor of being the first to portray the adult version of the character, actually provide him with some distinction as their performances portray him as a simple minded yet savage man-child with a grudge against society.

Director Steve Miner keeps the pace moving briskly, imbuing enough shorthand so that we quickly know each character. In a scene that would probably make Joe Dante proud, he cuts from a little dog approaching Jason to hot dogs grilling on a barbecue. He also pays strict attention to the geography of the rooms and campground, giving the viewer a clear vision of the surroundings and the atmosphere of the lake. Miner's skills though really flourish once the murders become more prevalent, and the film transitions towards its fast moving final act. Smartly, he does not provide a full-on appearance by Jason other than passing views and shadows until more than fifty minutes into the film, and when he's finally revealed, it proves quite bracing. The last act is all chase, and it's a thrilling and unrelenting twenty or so minutes that never calms down, with Harry Manfredini's score (cribbed heavily from Bernard Hermann's work on Psycho) laying on the strings to maximum levels of intensity and jump scares that actually are still effective.

Lucky for the film that Miner proved to be a solid director at maintaining thrills because the MPAA took a knife to the gore with Jason like precision. Probably feeling the first Friday pulled a fast one after it became such an unexpectedly big hit, the censors would begin to crack down on violence in major studio released horror film as a response (the Paramount distributed My Bloody Valentine was another 1981 victim), threatening the films with a financially hobbling X rating. So the gratuitous skinny dipper's death is off-screen and even though a still would appear on the back of the VHS box, we cut away before seeing a double impalement. Strangely a more vicious kill, a machete to the face of a wheelchair bound counselor, passes muster, perhaps due to the fact it was stolen from Mario Bava's Bay of Blood.

Mainstream critics notoriously despised the Friday the 13th series, and much ink was spent on how it reflected everything that was wrong with society. Looking at them today though, the films are a bit quaint. In the wake of the Saw films the gore seems tame, and following the interchangeable anonymous victims in the Final Destination series, the Friday films are practically character pieces! While I am passed the point of letting nostalgic memories hinder my opinions or reviews, I must admit that on a personal level, these films meant a lot to me as a teenager and burgeoning film fan. They're nowhere near the achievements of John Carpenter's Halloween or Bob Clark's Black Christmas and lack the stylistic flourishes of a Bava or Dario Argento film, but the first four Friday the 13ths are all solid B-level horror films. And part II is the best of the lot!

31 Days of '81 Horror: Hell Night (Tom DeSimone)

2011-10-12T20:00:00.000-07:00

From the same producer (Mustapha Akkad) and distributor (Compass International) as John Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic, Halloween, Hell Night takes place over the course of a single night, much like the majority of Carpenter’s film. Opening with a scream, which is not of horror, but of revelry, director Tom DeSimone and cinematographer Mac Ahlberg pull off an ambitious opening tracking shot that lasts about ninety seconds and impressively encompasses a large scale frat party where the attendants are costumed as literary characters(Robin Hood, etc.). Two initiation hopefuls and their girlfriends (Linda Blair, Jenny Neumann) will become members of the fraternity if they stay the whole night at an abandoned mansion of a man who ritually killed his family. Of course, the frat members don’t plan on making it easy and have rigged dummies, creepy noises and fog machines in an attempt to frighten the guests into an early exit, but lo and behold, it appears that there is actually someone or something that is really trying to murder the college kids.

Hell Night has two disparate tones; the early half is charmingly light and humorous, the latter half more typical slasher fare. Since the number of potential victims is low, we spend more time with them then we would in other films of the ilk, they may not be the most balanced characters cinema has to offer, but the four actors have strong chemistry and charisma. The tone is so light that when the killings do begin through the final frame, I kept anticipating an April Fool’s Day like twist, which ultimately was never coming. The second half of the film is darker, becoming a chase film with minimum dialogue and emphasis on suspense over violent kills a la Halloween. Hell Night is nowhere near the masterpiece that Carpenter’s film is, and it comparatively displays the directorial command of Carpenter, but there’s a respect of the audience’s intelligence by not providing any backstory other than the opening forewarning by the frat leader, and one or two scares that still hold up today.

31 Days of '81 Horror: Graduation Day (Herb Freed)

2011-10-11T20:00:00.000-07:00

In the opening scenes/credit sequence, which is almost Sam Peckinpah-ish in its ambitious editing techniques, a star athlete collapses from exhaustion in the midst of a track meet and dies. Cut to graduation week, the dead athelete’ sister Anne (Patch MacKenzie) returns to town from the military and one by one other seniors of the class are being picked off by an unseen assailant. Is the sister behind this? The driven coach (Christopher George) who can’t stomach disappointment? Or someone else?

An early cheapie production from Troama, which would account for some bad humor, Graduation Day is obviously meant to capitalize on the slasher phenomenon of the day (even centering around an annual event like Halloween) but with little to no care for manufacturing either suspenseful atmosphere, creative kills or characters that are not just undeveloped, but not even recognizable. Though oddly the editing is really experimental and mostly top notch. I’ve worked on low budget horror films (my uncle is a frequent director of Direct to Video genre fare), so I am very forgiving of the necessities of cutting corners, however, save for the actors I was familiar with prior to watching and the sister, not a single character made any impression, thus their deaths only resulted in me asking: is this a character we’ve seen before? With the opening montage being free of dialogue, there’s never any scene establishing characters or their relationship. Most of the time when we meet someone, it’s before they’re about to be killed off. It appears the film was structured around a given actor’s availability and not storytelling. To make matters worse, the film is overstuffed with characters like a pervy music teacher and befuddled principal that bare no impact on the story other than increasing the runtime to a painfully slow ninety minute mark. There’s not even a cool Michael Myers mask, as most of the murders are shot from the killer’ POV.

Thirty years later, Graduation Day’s main draw is seeing early performances from future 80’s scream queen Linnea Quigley (who in a sign of the frustrating nature of the film, plays a character I am not sure was either a member of the track squad and/or killed) and future letter-turner Vanna White. But of most interest to me, was another role for famed Enter the Ninja’s ninja desiring baddie, Christopher George, who continued his commitment to chewing scenery and taking names in 1981!

31 Days of '81 Horror: Holiday Horror

2011-10-11T12:00:00.000-07:00

Holidays. The time we gather with are closest friends and dearest relatives to celebrate the passing of another year, reflect upon the changes in our lives, and become fodder for maniacal serial killers seeking vengeance for misconduct perpetrated several years (or even decades) ago.

Yes, the combination of slasher films plus seasonal celebration have been intertwined ever since Bob Clark’s Black Christmas surrounded the merriment with uh, murderment, back in 1974. Four years later, John Carpenter would cement this symbiotic relationship with his groundbreaking film, Halloween. Between the release of that film and 1981, we had seen various havoc committed on such normally festive celebratory dates as New Year’s Eve (New Year’s Evil), Christmas (Christmas Evil), and Friday the 13^th (duh..). But the floodgates would open in 1981, and Valentine’s Day, Graduation Day, even, your birthday was not safe anymore, not to mention encore terror on Friday the 13^th and Halloween.

The next six days we will be studying the effects of holidays on your health, prognosis: deadly!

31 Days of '81 Horror: The Final Conflict (Graham Baker)

2011-10-10T20:00:00.000-07:00

Damien Thorn, the little scamp from The Omen who turned out to be anti-Christ (kids these days!) and survived a murder attempt by his dad, Atticus Finch, is back, now thirty-two years old and a successful corporate CEO and the US Ambassador to England with a promising political future. Thorn in ’84! However, the stars have aligned, and as prophesized, a baby child who will become the second coming of Jesus Christ is to be born, an anti-anti-Christ if you will, and thwart his plan of world domination. Damien also has to deal with a hit squad of seven Italian monks who have recovered the Israeli daggers that are the only means of killing him. Good thing that Satan guy’s got his back, because Team Satan comes with tons of cool mind control tricks!

I should mention here that I have not seen the second film in the Omen trilogy (we’ll pay no heed to the fourth made-for-FOX T V movie or 2006 remake of the original) since high school, the same time I last saw this one, which I frankly remembered nothing from. From my recent viewing, I think only a familiarity with the first film is required, although I don’t quite remember or know how the head of the Italian monastery knows with certainty that Damien is the anti-christ.

The first film and the third film show an interesting contrast in expectations of a major studio produced horror film in the 1970s versus 1981. In 1976, thanks to big hits like Jaws and The Exorcist, FOX poured a lot of money into the budget of The Omen, and even secured acting legend Gregory Peck in a lead role. Even, the second film had William Holden still hot off of Network. The Final Conflict , however, is cast mainly with character actors and new faces, and oddly, a completely foreign (to the US at least) affair, with a Brit, Graham Baker helming, New Zealand actor Sam Neil (making his US film debut) as Damien and shoot entirely in England. This contrast between the decades results in a tonal struggle where the film’s A picture roots and B picture sizzle scenes never fully mesh.

Baker gives the film a very cinematic look and The Final Conflict has a grand scope. Jerry Goldsmith, the composer of the original, provides an operatic, if too bombastic and disruptive score. But it’s a little boring when it tries to put on airs. However, when Sam Neil, who also gives a gonzo performance in another film I’ll discuss this month, Possession, is finally let loose, in a scene where he prays to his savior in front of a reverse crucified Jesus statue, the film hits a gear of ridiculousness that is quite fun. This is a film comprised of a hit squad of seven monks, all who fail hilariously (unintentionally) and find themselves either self-immolated, tossed off of a large bridge or eaten by a pack of dogs as well as a montage of Damien’s followers or the parents themselves murdering newborn children, though just below frame, to prevent the second coming of Jesus.

Ultimately, it feels like a film whose screenplay (credited to Andrew Birkin) needed another draft or two. I kept inventing cooler scenarios in my head while watching the film, like why not embrace the “men on a mission” aspect of the monks, and make it a Dirty Dozen type recruitment, training and plan implementation outline. Or what if Damien is having self-doubts about his fate, since he’s been amongst humans for three plus decades? The film makes a big to-do about the second coming of Christ, and implies heavily that he’s the son of one of Damien’s closest aides, but that is pretty much pushed aside, and we’re just told, “hey don’t worry about it, Christ 2.0 is safe and good”. And if Damien is losing powers all the time new Christ is around, why is that never really reflected in his actions? Would a power losing anti-christ still be able to convince a mother to charbroil her new son’s face with an iron? Cause if so, and I were Damien, I wouldn’t worry all that much. The Final Conflict has flourishes of a great “what the fuck” horror movie that goes to uncomfortable places, but it never fully embraces this side, and we’re left with a halfhearted film and not one, but two pre-end credit bible verse quotes to let us know it will all be okay, especially disappointing considering the wickedly disturbing final scene of the original.

31 Days of '81 Horror: Fear No Evil (Frank LaLoggia)

2011-10-09T20:00:00.000-07:00

A passion project for Frank LaLoggia (the name the tabloids would give the union of Frank Langella and Robert Loggia if they ever became a couple, and you know, fingers crossed) who directed, wrote, co-produced, and provided the score, Fear No Evil comes at the tail end of the seventies religious themed horror films (The Exorcist, The Omen) which would fall out of flavor in the 1980’s to the cheaper slasher genre. But more than those two films, it owes a debt to Carrie, as it concerns teenagers and high school outcasts coming to grips with possessing otherworldly powers. In a pre-credit sequence we learn that the antichrist enters the bodies of newborn children every generation. Two Archangels in charge of preventing the Antichrist from reigning follow suit to stop him. Cut to the christening of Andrew Williams (Stefan Arngrim) an adorable baby who profusely bleeds from every orifice as holy water drips upon him. Eighteen years later he has driven a line between his dotting mother and annoyed father, whose lives and home are now in disrepair. Andrew is the smartest kid in school, but dismissed by all others, including his crush Gabrielle, who unbeknownst to even her, is one of the Archangels meant to stop him.

I mentioned the parallels to Carrie, but I think the film would have been stronger if it had more in common with that film, and Andrew, like the titular character of the Stephen King story, was slowly realizing his purpose through the course of the film. By the first time we see him as an eighteen year old, he’s already practicing black magic and playing tricks on his parents and students. It would have at least given the character an arc, instead of the one note it plays as. LaLoggia definitely has aspirations to tell a big story, and for a low budget film it has high ambition employing frequent use of special effects and set amongst multiple eras. In his favor he found a great shooting location in New York with a castle, its surrounding lakes and constant shrouding fog that I actually assumed was shot somewhere in Europe, and he stages a very intricate operatic ceremony for Andrew’s evil coming out to counter attack the town’s annual reenactment of Christ’s crucifixion (good times!). However, the special effects is really bad animation with a vomitorium of colors that when they overtake the action in the final conflict, distract to the point I could not concentrate on a single thing happening on screen. The film drags, is indifferently shot and edited and contains a choppy, unfocused script. The main actors are wooden and fail to enliven the already thinly drawn characters. Typical of the depth of the characters is the fact that the manner of dress and style by the “hoodlums” imply that LaLoggia, or his costume designers, thought Grease was a documentary on modern teenage life. Somehow though the film was able to secure a killer soundtrack featuring the likes of Talking Heads, Richard Hell, the B-52s, the Sex Pistols and Boomtown Rats.

31 Days of '81 Horror: Bloody Birthday (Ed Hunt)

2011-10-08T20:00:00.000-07:00

There's a ruthless murder roaming the small California town Meadowvale, actually make that three: Debbie, Curtis and Steven, three precocious tykes whose shared 10th birthday is just around the corner. These children were all born within minutes of each other during a solar eclipse that we learn from our final girl Joyce (Lori Lethin), an astrology junkie, means that the sun and moon blocked Jupiter leading to a certain emotional disconnect. And she couldn't be more right, as the trio methodically dispose of such annoyances as teachers, parents and friends via such means as repeated hits over the head with baseball bats, burying alive or just blowing them away via a stolen revolver, all with a dispassionate, clinical precision.

While paying close adherence to genre conventions, Bloody Birthday embraces it's potential ridiculous conceit, seeing it through to the end without ever entering satirical territory. It's the Bad Seed meets Halloween, and it's a joy. In fact, while not the cinematic titan or anywhere near as atmospheric as Carpenter's classic, the film plays as a parallel universe version of Halloween, if Michael Myers never was sent to an institution as a child, continued the killing spree he started that fateful Halloween night, and had two friends assisting him.

Director Hunt keeps the film moving along at a good pace, and grounded even while the script (which Hunt co-wrote with Barry Pearson) goes full tilt into a more and more demented place. A nice touch is while the kids are smarter than any of the ignorant adults, and capable of easily manipulating their older prey, they are still kids and prone to wrap their more sadistic tendencies with such childlike vocations as playing hide and go seek. They even keep a scrapbook of their crimes! The cast is game, especially the pigtailed and cherub faced Debbie (Elizabeth Hoy) and Curtis (Billy Jayne who would go on to play the brother in Just One of the Guys and the best friend on Parker Lewis Can't Lose), the glasses sporting mastermind whose a pint size Dirty Harry with a gun. Lethin is good in the plain Jane/Jamie Lee Curtis surrogate role, and has one of the more memorable scenes when suspecting Curtis has poisoned the frosting on a birthday cake, goes through the party knocking over plate after plate, only to be tricked into looking like a paranoid fool in front of the entire community. Comedian Julie Brown makes an early, and frequently naked, appearance as the sister of Debbie, and look for future American Ninja Michael Dudikoff in a small role. Bloody Birthday is a fun, jaw dropping experience, and deserving of the cult status it has gained.

31 Days of '81 Horror: Kids Kill the Darndest Things

2011-10-08T12:00:00.000-07:00

Kids are evil! They don't call them "little devils" for nothing. Okay, maybe not all of them, but c'mon every time I see a tow-headed moppet, I can't help but think to myself, "that little scamp is plotting something".

I don't know, maybe I've seen The Bad Seed too much. Or Village of the Damned. Or for that matter: the Omen, The Children, Orphan, The Good Son, Children of the Corn, Joshua, Pet Sematary, It's Alive, The Ring and Who Can Kill a Child? Maybe you think I am paranoid. Maybe I am, but the next few days we will look at a few movies that prove my "children are harbingers of doom" theory. See you in a few hours for the first 1981 film in our mini children/teens with bad intentions horror movie marathon, until then I am stuck babysitting this kid, Danny. Wait, what's that? He wrote REDRUM on our mirror, what the hell does that mean? And stop doing that voice thing with your finger!

31 Days of '81 Horror: Wolfen (Michael Wadleigh)

2011-10-07T20:00:00.000-07:00

A prominent pair of New York movers and shakers are killed in a grizzly manner more animalistic in nature than anything possibly perpetuated by man. This is followed by a similar attack on a drug dealer in the Bronx. Detective Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney), a gifted if burnt out smartass is put in charge of making sense of these savage acts and paired with the young psychology expert Rebecca Neff (Diane Verona) and an opinionated mortician (Gregory Hines). Is there political terrorism at play? Or something more supernatural? And how exactly does a frequently naked running Edward James Olmos come into play?

Wolfen’s most notable contribution to cinema is the thermography imaged POV shots of the wolf stalking its prey. This technique would be used famously in John McTiernan’s 1987 sci-fi action film Predator. But like that film’s sequel, director Michael Wadleigh over relies on the technique to the point it quickly lessens suspense; and be cautious, it could easily become a dangerous drinking game. Wadleigh, who made his name in documentary filmmaking, including the concert film Woodstock, does a good job of using the real decay of its early 1980’s Bronx locales with their crumbling apartment complexes long since destroyed for insurance money serving as a metaphorical modern urban jungle. In fact Wadleigh’s film could serve as a judgment on architecture in general as he very distinctly contrasts the sleek Manhattan condominiums to the fallen bureau. Also, eerily, and perhaps this is due to events not related to anything in the actual film, the World Trade Center seems to always be shot dead center in every background shot of the city landscape.

Sadly, everything else is kind of half assed and unsatisfying. Finney is sleepwalking through his performance and is saddled with more bad one-liners than your typical CSI episode, and the final sequence just kind of limps to a close without any real excitement or sense of dread. The central mythology behind the attacks is interesting, but I wish we spent more time with Olmos’ and the Native Americans who pay umbrage to the wolf rather than one clunky exposition scene in a bar. If you only see one wolf based movie released in 1981, see American Werewolf in London. However, if you see two, see American Werewolf and the Howling, then if you still need another one, go ahead and give Wolfen a try.

31 Days of '81 Horror: The Howling (Joe Dante)

2011-10-06T20:00:00.000-07:00

The first line of dialogue uttered in The Howling is the word “repressed” as spoken by a television psychiatrist, an apt statement of the theme of the film: how the lycanthrope affected individuals reveal their inner sexual desires and deviancy burrowed deep inside when their flesh turns to fur. When we first meet investigative news journalist Karen White (Dee Wallace) she’s in a seedy stretch of Los Angeles full of strip joints and pornography shops (which in real life is a few blocks of Santa Monica I pass by everyday on my commute home) where she plans to interview and assist the police in capturing notorious murderer Eddie Quist (Robert Picardo). She’s successful in luring Eddie to being shot and (allegedly) killed by the police, but the affair has a lasting emotional impact that infects her dreams and renders her unable to perform her job or be intimate with her husband, Bill (future real-life husband of Wallace, Christopher Stone). At the urging of her psychiatrist (Patrick Macnee), the couple goes to “The Colony” an open space near the ocean, to relax and recuperate. Little do they know that they are being led smack dab in the middle of a clan of werewolves.

Take it as no slag when I say The Howling is the second best werewolf film in 1981, which is not indicative of any lack of quality, but the misfortune of sharing a release calendar with An American Werewolf in London. Like Landis’ masterpiece, Joe Dante is able to meld humor and winking references to past werewolf and horror cinema, such as an appearance by a Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine carrying Forrest Ackerman, without distracting from the tension of the suspense and excitement. One of the darker toned films in Dante’s oeuvre, that sensibility is reflected in the cinematography that uses darkness as a key stylistic choice and making the color that does leak through that much more abrasive and effective; like American Werewolf there’s a tinge of tragedy to the proceedings. The script by John Sayles (who also cameos as a disgusting food eating mortician) has no unnecessary exposition and nary a wasted moment, and takes subtle but smart digs at cult mind think pervasive at the time such as Jonestown and EST.

Dee Wallace gives a great performance as the fragile newswoman as she headlines an exceptional, and large, cast that all imbue their characters with personality no matter how much or little screen time they’re given, including Stone, MacNee, future hack Adam Sandler film director Dennis Dugan, Belinda Balaski, and the sexy leather adorned Elisabeth Brooks. Dante regulars Kevin McCarthy and Dick Miller get their moments to shine, and Picardo gives an especially creepy performance as the demented masochistic Eddie. Also appearing in small roles are Hollywood legends Slim Pickens, John Carradine and in a self-effacing role, Roger Corman. The work of make-up artist Rob Bottin, which includes a very long drawn out transformation, is certainly good enough to inspire debates to this day of which scene is more effective, the Howling’s or the Academy Award winning work of Rick Baker for American Werewolf in London.

31 Days of '81 Horror: An American Werewolf in London (John Landis)

2011-10-05T20:00:00.000-07:00

One of the more intriguing aspect of the werewolf character is not only does it make external the burrowed malicious desires (both of a violent and sexual nature) deep inside men, but it often deals with the consequences when the lycanthrope affected comes to the realization of what he has wrought. John Landis mines subversive laughs, genuine pathos for our lead and real terror in An American Werewolf in London, his best film and my favorite of the three wolf centered films released in 1981. Seeped in cinema history, Werewolf is full of visual, verbal and audio references to werewolves, never to a point of distraction, but to provide brief glimpses of levity in what is at times a truly heartbreaking film.

Being a tourist in your own skin is another central metaphor of the werewolf genre and Landis externalizes this by making the man behind the beast, an actual tourist, away from the safety of his home. On a backpacking trip across Europe with his best friend, our lead, David Kessler (David Naughton), is actually a well brought up Jewish boy which we learn through dialogue and frenzied dream visions that serve the purpose of providing backstory (screenwriters take note), and allowing for both a scare and a laugh. Struck in the moors by a werewolf, and losing his best friend in the process, David is completely alone in a part of the world divorced from comfort and family. He’s a stranger, even in his own flesh.

Naughton and Griffin Dunne as his best friend and rotting conscience have a chemistry and rapport that is believably genuine. Naughton is great as the everyman American college student, stuck in the age between being a child and having real life responsibilities, so confident in safe environs, and so lost outside of his comfort zone. His final call home is sad in its verisimilitude awkward and elliptical nature. Jenny Agutter as David’s nurse and keeper post infection transcends the typical “love interest” with a gentle warmth and humane spirit. And Rick Baker’s make-up and effects work throughout, but especially on David’s first transformation, and transmit the same painful reaction to the viewer as it does to the slow bone cracking metamorphosing werewolf. Still to this day one of the best effect scenes in the history of cinema, Baker was rightly awarded with an Oscar for his work.

Balancing genres like comedy, horror, and a tragedy is a difficult task, often times if the jokes are too self referential, it sours the tragic implications or lessens the suspense. And transitioning disparate tones can be jarring if ineffective. John Landis succeeds in every way with An American Werewolf in London, and the result is not only one of the best horror films of 1981, best one of the best films of the year, period.

31 Days of '81 Horror: Wolf Like Me

2011-10-05T12:00:00.000-07:00

Out of all of the monsters from the original batch of Universal horror films, the werewolf has always been the most sympathetic for the pure reason that it is us. When a full moon rises, he exposes our inner demons that manifest themselves outward, be it of a murderous, sexual or basketball playing nature.

Three horror films were released in 1981 that centered around wolves, though only two concern themselves with werewolves. I will cover all three over the next few days. See you tonight, bring your own silver bullets and wolf bane.

Recommended supplementary material:

Scene and Song: An American Werewolf in London by leopard13

The Gentleman's Guide to Midnite Cinema reviews The Howling and The Howling II

31 Days of '81 Horror: Nightmare (aka Nightmares in a Damaged Brain) (Romano Scavoldi)

2011-10-04T20:00:00.000-07:00

Despite having a budget so low it would probably only cover one day’s worth of craft services on the set of a Friday the 13^th sequel, writer-director Romano Scavolini is able to craftily utilize some on location shooting (probably gathered guerilla style) and a good amount of practical gore effects that help to compensate for some of the deficiencies (acting, poor shot compositions) that the budget entailed. While rough around the edges, and in obvious debt to many influences, primarily Maniac and Deep Red, the result is an interesting and enjoyable if infantile, excessively gory, overly sadistic and sleazy good time.

George Tatum (Baird Stafford who sort of resembles both Mark Hamill and Michael Shannon) has just been released from the psych ward after his doctor has determined an experimental treatment has cured him of his past psychotic schizophrenia. And you know what, the doctor was right, he was cured, end of film, roll credits. Just joshing. No, George just can’t shake an early episode from his childhood when he caught his dad having some kinky S & M sex with a prostitute, probably because this confusing correlation of sex and violence ended with little George (about the age of eight) taking an axe to both his father and the whore and chopping away. Now, he wakes up screaming and anytime his sexual urges are aroused he ends up in the fetal position on the ground, foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog. Ignoring his doctor, he makes the journey down the coast from New York to Florida (which Scavolini depicts by having the DJ for whatever town he’s in say something like “Your listening to Myrtle Beach’s number one rock station” which I thought was a nice clever touch) where he plans not on a restful personal retirement, but retiring a bunch of hot women from various parts of their bodies. Meanwhile, in Daytona Beach an overburdened and easily annoyed single mother lives with her three children. Amongst the kids is CJ, a rapscallion prone to playing such childhood favorite tricks such as dressing up in a mask and oversized suit and scaring the babysitter in the shower and faking being stabbed so convincingly that his siblings call his mom who has to rush home from a booty call on a boat. What’s the connection between the killer and CJ, and what will George do when he reaches them?

Like Deep Red, Nightmare repeatedly returns to a flashback of the fresh faced George as a kid while a children’s lullaby plays on the soundtrack to increasingly eerie ends. But I don’t think Scavolini quite processed that Dario Argento’s use of the flashback was to slowly unveil the incident, while slightly subverting expectations. What occurred in Nightmare’s flashback is pretty obvious from the get go, so it seems like padding as we just learn more and more details. Nightmare also owes a debt to the prior year’s Maniac, a fairly sympathetic yet gory insight into the mind of a serial killer while he plies his trade. While Stafford is a unique screen presence, he doesn’t bring the depth of performance and emotional turmoil that Joe Spinell gave to his film.

And speaking of Maniac, that film was aided by some powerhouse special effects by guru of gore, Tom Savini. Savini’s name and credentials are touted twice on Nightmare’s poster. However, he actually served solely as a consultant on the picture, and sued the distributor over false advertising. His name is nowhere in either the opening or closing credits, but his influence is definitely all over the place (which is the tenuous enough link I needed to include it as part of the Tom Savini portion of this project). And let that not distract from the good work actually performed by the film’s special effects coordinator Ed French, who would follow this film with a storied career in genre movies and the occasional blockbuster such as Terminator II and Star Trek VI. French fills the film with fountains of blood, multiple decapitations, axes to the head and punctured body parts. Sure the small budget means it’s not the most sophisticated of work, but I will take it any day over such modern cinema crimes as digital blood!

31 Days of '81 Horror: Eyes of a Stranger (Ken Wiederhorn)

2011-10-03T20:00:00.000-07:00

A modern (well 1981) take on a Hitchcockian thriller but with very early 80’s level of gore (provided by our pal Tom Savini, who also provided makeup and effects for the prior two days’ films, The Prowler and The Burning) and a dash of giallo (expressionist coloring in murder sequences, soft focus flashback); it’s a combination that with only an occasional awkward moment or two meshes well under director Ken Wiederhorn’s supervision.

A madman is murdering women in Miami, and news anchorwoman Jane Harris (Lauren Tewes) is taking it very seriously, almost personally. She issues off-script warnings on the air, which stems from the fact she still feels guilty over an incident that happened when she was a child and failed to look after her sister Tracy (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who was sexually molested, and sent into a state of shock that rendered her deaf, dumb and blind (no mention is made to her pinball prowess). Jane’s convinced the murderer is Stanley Herbert, a co-inhabitant of the same trendy high rise condominium, who often seems to come home very late at night. Stanley seemed like such an obvious candidate, that I jokingly remarked to myself while watching it that his character’s name should be Red T. Herring, but in a twist to the twist, Stanley is actually the killer, and Jane’s suspicions were correct! But what happens when Herbert makes the connection whilst watching the news, and sets his eyes on the seemingly defenseless Tracy?

There’s a weird disconnect between the murder scenes, which are very cinematic in their stylistic composition and coloring not to mention the high levels of Savini’s gore (severed heads, slit throats that gusher out blood) and the Jane investigating the neighbor portion which come off as a made-for-TV level Hitchcock tribute (specifically it’s very reminiscent of another high-rise condo set made for television film, John Carpenter’s Someone’s Watching Me), that is jarring at first, but Wiederhorn has enough skill at both disparate methods, that it eventually gels into cohesion. The film takes another emotional twist when Tracy’s does become involved in the murder plot, and Herbert plays cruel tricks by moving stuff around to fuck with her, and it turns very uncomfortably creepy. And I mean that in the best way!

Lauren Tewes is kind of generic and wooden as a lead, and pales in comparison to another blonde anchorwoman in a 1981 horror film, The Howling’s Dee Wallace, but John DiSanti is effective at a sort of unhinged yet mild mannered psychotic. In a nice nod to Rear Window, he’s made to look very similar to Raymond Burr in the Hitchcock classic. In her screen debut, Jennifer Jason Leigh displays the fine actor she would become, and all without speaking and playing blind. In fact, she elevates one of the dumber moments of the film with her soulfulness when (SPOILER ALERT) she regains her vision after the failed rape attempt by Herbert, I guess like multiplication where two negatives equals a positive, a second sexual assault results in the resurgences of her senses. Leigh looks at herself in the mirror, seeing the alterations since she last had vision, and gently caresses her breast, a signifier of the woman she has become after having her childhood and teen years snatched away. Credit Wiederhorn for keeping that scene in, it’s a gentle and human moment in an otherwise exploitative, but very well made, horror film.

31 Days of '81 Horror: The Burning (Tony Maylam)

2011-10-02T20:00:00.000-07:00

Adhering to the strict Halloween/Friday the 13th template discussed in yesterday’s review of The Prowler, and adding an element I failed to mention there: the subjective POV shots of the killer, or what in this instance I like to label after the film’s killer: Cropsy vision (convex circular images with Vaseline smeared edges), The Burning is one of the best of the slasher genre to follow in the direct wake of the overwhelming success of the prior year’s Friday the 13^th. It also has the highest average of douchey character per horror film out of that crop, which in and of itself is quite a remarkable feat. Remember the inciting incident that lead to Mama Vorhees’ slaughter? Two camp counselors skirted their duties to make love leading to the drowning of her unattended mentally retarded son. That’s a pretty lofty display of a lack of work ethic, but you know, at least they didn’t throw the swimming disabled kid in the river themselves. Well, here four upstate New York campers decide to play a trick on the groundskeeper, Cropsy, for the crime of being unattractive, surly and frequently drunk (never mind the reason behind the last two are due to working for silver spoon mouthed assholes). So what do they do? Why the find what looks like a decayed animal skull and put a candle in it, then scare him awake, leading, of course, to his bed lighting ablaze as well as his cabin (and all earthly possessions) when propane tanks explode, burning the man to a crisp.

It takes Cropsy five years to seek his vengeance, and poor guy probably didn’t even get the actual kids responsible for his disfigurement, which kind of makes him the Paul Kersey (Death Wish 1 version) of slashers. But the assholicity doesn’t end there my friends, one of the campers, and Cropsey fodder, indirectly leads to the death of his girlfriend, who is probably a virgin, when she has reservations in sleeping with his guido ass (though she’s does join in him skinny dipping). The future date rapist leaves her alone in the woods, to be carved up by Cropsey. Even, our final guy here (yes, guy not girl) who is the typical “Boy who cried wolf but there’s really a wolf” archetype, spies on the girls showering.

The Burning is probably best known today for being a launching pad for several of the cast and crew. It’s Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s first produced film to bare the Miramax film brand (or don’t you remember the advertisements of The English Patient extolling the “From the Studio that Brought you The Burning” enticements?), included amongst the five people credited with story or screenplay credit is future Paramount Pictures head and Sopranos producer Brad Grey, and editor Jack Sholder went on to have a decent career in directing television and features, with credits that include Nightmare on Elm Street 2 and The Hidden. But the real fun comes from the cast full of future familiar faces. It’s not uncommon to see one or two actors who went on to have successful careers get their start in 1980’s independent horror including Johnny Depp (A Nightmare on Elm Street), Kevin Bacon (Friday the 13^th), Brad Pitt (Cutting Class), even Vanna White (Graduation Day), but The Burning features several, including Fast Times at Ridgemont High’s Ratner, Brian Becker, Fisher Stevens, Emmy Award winner Jason Alexander, and in a role that is a glorified reoccurring extra, future Best Actress Oscar winner Holly Hunter. The talented cast elevates the level of acting we’ve come to expect from the genre, even if half of them are playing major douchebags.

In 1981, probably the biggest get for the small production was make-up/special effects guru Tom Savini, who chose to ply his trade here rather than return to Crystal Lake and the higher budgeted Friday the 13^th part II. My guess is that after the original Friday was gutted in parts (but nowhere near the level the sequels would be) by the MPAA to obtain an R rating, he deduced that the smaller status of The Burning would lead to less scrutinizing, and more freedom. The shining example of his skill is in the raft sequence, which became a bit of an internet meme a few years ago. There’s so much going on that it’s nearly impossible to take it in all at one sitting. Up to that point in the film, it’s been a slow burn, so not only is the appearance of Cropsy shocking, the speed and fury in which he dispatches the victims is even more effective. You will also notice that unlike most slasher film deaths that particular murder takes place during daylight, as do pretty much all of the kills in The Burning, a nice manner in which to fully display Savini’s skills.

31 Days of '81 Horror: The Prowler (Joseph Zito)

2011-10-01T20:00:00.000-07:00

Watching a number of the slasher films that followed in the post-Halloween and Friday the 13th era, you tend to notice a strictly adhered to template: an opening instigating event set years (and often times decades) in the past*, some sort of community festivity (a dance, trick-or-treating, camping season) occurring on the anniversary of said event ** (preferably for the first time since the occurrence of the instigating event), and a killer in a cool outfit***; mix in a plucky and possibly, but not always, virginal, Final Girl****, and a Carrie inspired final shock*****, and viola, you get generic 1981 slasher film. The Prowler does not reinvent any wheels, it’s no Halloween/Black Christmas level masterpiece, but you know what, it’s a competently made wheel that drives just swell thank you very much.

*In this case, a civilization returning World War II soldier who discovers his true love, Rosemary, did not wait for him and is in the arms of another man. He offs the happy couple in a gazebo with a pitchfork (that should totally be an option for the Clue board game!)

** A Spring Fling type dance that’s being held for the first time since the 1945 murders

***WWII fatigues and helmets, with a sand mask covering his face

****The pretty and naturalistic Pam (Vicky Dawson) who has a crush on the local deputy

*****Well, I’ll let you see for yourself.

The film moves at a briskly paced 88 minutes, but sometimes to the sacrifice of a well-rounded story. I like that it’s a small town and it feels like all the characters are familiar with one another, at least by reputation, but most of these relationships are never really explained to the audience, including the secret identity of the killer who is mentioned, but never actually seen until he’s demasked in the final minutes. And the teenage death fodder here makes the average Friday the 13^th victim look well rounded.

That said the proceedings are elevated by the sure handed direction of Joseph Zito, who would go on to helm the inappropriately named Friday the 13^th The Final Chapter, one of the best in that series. Definitely, more of a John Carpenter acolyte than that of the more anonymous stylings of, say, original Friday the 13th director Sean Cunnigham, Zito is very good at churning tension from spatial compositions, though he does favor the investigating duo just nearly discovering damning evidence before moving on a bit too much, and not once but twice a randomly located character who we’ve never seen before jumps out and provides a cheap scare. Vicky Dawson is very good as the Final Girl, both fragile and determined like an actual teenage girl; she looks more like a small town beauty than the generic supermodels that would play the role in a modern film.

But the MVP of The Prowler must go to heavily employed in 1981 (see also Eyes of a Stranger and The Burning) make-up and special effects artist Tom Savini. He creates stomach churning pitchfork piercing, throat slashing and head destroying shotgun blasts, that proves for, what the zillionth time, that practical effects are where it is always at. Savini claims this is his best work, and he might be right on a cumulative scale, though I think the raft slaughter in The Burning and the shotgun blast in Maniac take the prize for individual scenes.

31 Days of '81 Horror: Tom Savini, the Guru of Gore

2011-10-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

I will be splitting 31 Days of ’81 Horror into seven categories, the first of which, is a four day celebration of highly influential special effects/make-up artist Tom Savini, featuring reviews of the three films which he worked directly on in 1981, and one for which he was merely a consultant, though you wouldn’t know it by the way that film’s poster advertises its association with him.

Savini, who was a combat photographer in Vietnam, an experience which informed the gruesome verisimilitude of his work, started out his career on George A. Romero’s Martin, an off-kilter vampire story which took a realistic approach to the folklore of the immortal bloodsucker. Over the course of the two men’s career, Romero and Savini would frequently collaborate, including Romero’s follow-up to Martin, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead. For that film, which included heads being destroyed by shotgun blasts, skin ripped off by hands and the pulling of intestines out of bodies, the gore effects were ramped up to heretofore unseen levels. His work on the highly successful Friday the 13^th in 1980 brought gore to the mainstream. A pretty standard (though decently made) slasher film that heavily borrowed elements from the Italian giallo genre and John Carpenter’s Halloween, Friday the 13^th’s multiple memorable kill scenes: spear through the neck, decapitation, etc, lead the movie to become a word of mouth success. Eventually, and as we will see through many of 1981’s film, the MPAA took umbrage to the fact that many underage kids were catching the Paramount Pictures distributed horror film, and became less lenient in what it let major studios get away with in their horror productions.

Still, 1981 was a great year for practical effects, and you had such talents as Stan Winston, Rick Baker, Rob Bottin, even an up-and-comer named Jim Cameron, plying their trade. But Savini’s influence and large output during the year makes him the perfect candidate to kick start a month of reviews of horror films released in 1981.

Reminder: 1 Day until 31 Days of '81 Horror

2011-09-30T20:00:00.000-07:00

Join me tomorrow as I kick off my tribute to all that was horror cinema in 1981 with a review of one horror film released in 1981 every day in October.

Posterized: Now Playing September 1981

2011-09-28T20:34:00.001-07:00

We're a few days away from the kickoff of 31 Days of '81 Horror, my month long tribute to the horror films released thirty years ago, but before we get to October, let's take a gander at the posters for the films that were released in North American theatres back in September of 1981. Pretty slim pickings, though admittedly, it's a month with lots of stuff I have yet to see. Out of the selections, Walter Hill's Southern Comfort, which I reviewed, is the best of the bunch.

Announcing 31 Days of '81 Horror

2011-09-20T20:45:00.000-07:00

And without further adieu, allow me to announce a project that will be starting on Saturday, October 1st: 31 Days of '81 Horror. And no, this has nothing do with that Netflix/Qwikster bullshit.

For the last two Octobers I have posted at least once a day either a review, song, trailer, poster artwork or various other oddity in celebration of the horror genre (Here are the 2010 posts, and 2009's), this time around I decided I would combine that trend with my 1981 project.

Coming three years after the monumental financial success of the independently produced Halloween, and a year after Friday the 13th repeated the formula to big fortunes, 1981 would see a slew of horror movies of budgets big, small and teensy weensy looking to capitalize. Some years have a plethora of disaster films, some a high quotient of super hero movies (whom I am kidding that's every year nowadays), 1981 was horror movie nirvana. No holiday would go without a madman's bloody vengeance, no camp counselor would be safe, and Tom Savini was heavily employed.

So to celebrate the efforts of the filmmakers of thirty years ago who toiled away with Karo syrup, red dye, and plaster to entertain and scare us, every day in October, I will post one review of a 1981 released horror movie. For the most part the reviews will be shorter than my normal length (and the crowd roars), approximately 2 to 3 paragraphs. I have gotten a head start, but still have some watching and writing left to do. By my count there are over 40 horror films from 1981, so I have an ample amount from which to choose.

I will probably post the September 1981 Posterized edition, but other than that, don't expect much content until the 1st. Since this is somewhat of a solo journey, if anyone is interested in either writing '81 Horror content for their blog, website or even here, let me know via comments (or email at kmdevine76@gmail.com), and I will definitely post or link to it. Here's a pretty comprehensive list of horror films from 1981.

Continental Divide (1981, Michael Apted)

2011-09-06T19:49:00.000-07:00

Part of the 1981 Project

There seems to come a point in every successful comic actor’s career when they want to display their range as an “actor”. No artist, or person for that matter, really wants to see themselves limited by labels. Bill Murray (Razor’s Edge, Lost in Translation), Steve Martin (Pennies from Heaven), Adam Sandler (Punch-Drunk Love, Spanglish), and Will Ferrell (Everything Must Go) are just a small number of examples of people who satiated this urge. And the switch from comedic to dramatic is actually less of a major shift than the opposite since comic actors, especially those who worked heavily in the sketch medium, need to hone dramatic chops to better skewer a wider range of targets. When the role and the right actor mix, the results can be amazing, like the humanity Jim Carrey brought to his role in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But if the material’s weak, there’s not a strong director providing a guiding hand, and the actor is left flailing, you get The Number 23. In 1981, John Belushi was definitely feeling the pull to expand the roles he was being offered. He switched roles with Dan Aykroyd in Neighbors (reviewed yesterday) and played the straight man. His penultimate film, Continental Divide, is not too far of a stretch in that he plays a sarcastic blowhard prone to the occasional pratfall, but did add something to his repertoire that wasn’t present in either Animal House, 1941 or Blues Brothers, a chance to play a romantic lead.

John Belushi is Ernie Souchak, a boisterous editorial commenter for the Chicago Sun-Times, hero to the working class, as well as pimps, prostitutes and muggers who respect his fiery articles so much they give him back his wallet after the realize who he is, and enemy to crooked politicians who run rampant in City Hall. After being attacked by the underlings of one of his subjects, Ernie’s editor sends him to the Rocky Mountains to hide and study the case of Nell Porter (Blair Brown), a Bostonian who gave up the city life to study, photograph and protect bald eagles. Living together in a secluded cabin in the Rockies, Ernie and Nell bicker and argue. But will they set aside their differences and find that opposite attract? Spoiler: Yes.

Written by Lawrence Kasden, who had a busy 1981 as he also wrote the screenplays for Raiders of the Lost Ark and his directorial debut Body Heat, Continental Divide is a bit of a throwback to the romantic comedies of a 1930s to 50s vintage, the type of film that perhaps Cary Grant would star in or Howard Hawks would direct. And actually, Hawks did direct a somewhat similar film in Man’s Favorite Sport with Rock Hudson as a sporting goods salesman who has no experience with the outdoors and must learn how to use many of the goods he sells from Paula Prentiss. While Belushi and Brown give decent and sometimes even charming performances as the mixed match lovers, the film feels inert. Noted documentary filmmaker and not so noted featured filmmaker Michael Apted is the director, and while everything is paced fine, there’s a sense of just going through the motions as we witness some of the laziest fish of water tropes. The romance is rushed, and every few moments an injury occurs to Belushi to keep up some kind of physical comedy quota. There’s some nice cinematography capturing both the Rockies and downtown Chicago, but those are probably more a product of the locations than any actual great cinematic achievement. The rest of the film is purely by the numbers point and shoot filmmaking. It does, however, come alive and actually contains something of a complex emotional question that most films concerning an opposites attract relationship ignore: How do two people with such disparate beliefs that only truly feel at home in different parts of the country/world maintain a long-term relationship? The resolution is kind of pat and simplistic, but it’s a rarely touched upon subject, and it leads to the film’s most lively moments, when the couple just can’t say goodbye to each other on an Amtrak train (even the presence of a train as primary mode of transportation feels like a throwback in 1981).

Though, like Neighbors, Continental Divide, is kind of forgotten today (though more readily available via both DVD and currently Netflix Instant), it has one significant benchmark, it’s the first film to be made through Steven Spielberg’s Amblin production company (though the famous E.T and Elliott on the bicycle silhouettes logo is missing, seeing how E.T. would not be released for another year). While neither of his final two films were particularly successful either commercially or critically, Belushi deserves credit for wanting to expand his range and it would have been interesting to see the type of roles he would have gone onto had he survived. Even though his drug addiction was escalating out of control, he had a desire to reshape his career. He was in the process of getting Noble Rot, a comedic adventure set in the milieu of Napa Valley wine vineyards, he co-wrote with Don Novello (SNL’s Father Guido Sarducci) off the ground. And his buddy Dan Aykroyd had written the role of Peter Venkman for him in his sci-fi/action comedy (and future blockbuster) Ghostbusters, though there’s no denying that Bill Murray’s smart aleck/sarcastic take on the character was a large attribute to that film’s success. Belushi showed fleeting moments in both Divide and Neighbors (more so the former than the latter), and was probably a good script or strong visionary director away from busting free of the Bluto stereotype.

Neighbors (1981, John G. Avildsen)

2011-09-05T20:02:00.000-07:00

Part of the 1981 Project

By the time 1981 rolled around, John Belushi had really only been in the public conscious for about five and a half years. And truthfully, when Saturday Night Live did premiere, the onus on cross-over potential was placed on Chevy Chase. But after Chase bolted midway into the second season, Belushi assumed the role of the show’s alpha-male. A diverse comedic talent, his frequent appearances on Weekend Update as a blowhard version of himself along with his breakthrough role in John Landis’ smash hit Animal House would cement his persona in the public eye as the chaotic loudmouth fat guy prone to pratfalls. So when it came time to cast Neighbors, his third collaboration with fellow SNL alum and good pal Dan Aykroyd, about a middle aged suburban schlub terrorized by his new obnoxious and chaotic next door neighbor, it seemed an obvious choice who would play who. However, before shooting commenced Belushi and Aykroyd flipped roles, and clad in the height of K-Mart fashion and with greying sideburns and temples, Belushi took the role of the everyman while Aykroyd played the bleached blonde, tattooed, polyester suited agent of chaos who turns his life upside down. Both performers are capable of playing either role and well, but here they bring nothing but painful straining attempts to eke laughs out of the thin material. In their defense they’re not given actual characters for which to play or motivation to latch upon, and director John G. Avildsen’s directing seems to consist of one principle: “just riff guys”, with the result on the level of outtake rehearsal footage.

Earl, a middle class suburban husband/father (Belushi) lives a quiet undistinguished existence in a small cul-de-sac surrounded by power lines that consists of only two houses. His life revolves around watching nature documentaries on public television and late night meals of burnt waffles with his wife (Kathryn Walker). Until that is, he's shaken by the introduction of new neighbor Vic (Aykroyd) who instantly torments, hassles and steals from him, and Vic’s sultry wife Ramona (Cathy Moriarity) who entices Earl with sexual advances. And then, uh wackiness ensue, I guess.

Larry Gelbart, writer/producer of MASH and Tootsie, is credited as the screenwriter here, but I am going to go out on a limb and guess that any attempts at a sound narrative structure were tossed out the window at an early stage. Everything seems improvised on the spot, and poorly at that. Not that I am slave to the Syd Field perfected beat for beat formula for a successful screenplay, especially in comedy. Some of the greatest comedies from the Marx Brothers to Anchorman have very thin strains of plot amongst several comedy beats, but even those examples are slavish proponents of the three act structure compared to Neighbors, which commits the greater sin of being groaningly unfunny (I laughed once, at the sight of Belushi holding coffee grinds in his hands…you kind of have to see it.) As mentioned earlier, there’s no recurring characteristics to any of the film’s roles, and characters completely change desires, personalities and motivation from scene to scene depending on the situation. Belushi’s Earl seems to be unhappy but comfortable in his existence, but also seemingly equally annoyed by his new characters, so when the final act shift occurs it’s completely inorganic and forced. There’s never any reasoning for the antics of Vic and Ramona. The basic tenant of conflict is two forces with contrasting desires coming to confrontation. While conflict is the driving force of the film, the rest of the equation is completely missing. Watching Neighbors, I couldn’t help but compare it to a much more successful film that also is entirely set on one suburban cul-de-sac, Joe Dante’s The Burbs. In that film you had a clearly defined lead character, a purpose for his concern, and a contrasting force with motivation, not to mention several smart and funny jabs at the suburban milieu.

John G. Avildsen, best known for his directing of inspirational sports theme movies (including Rocky, the Karate Kid films, The Power of One and Eight Seconds) has no feel for comedic setups. He shoots things carelessly, not cognizant of the rhythms comedy requires. He was coming off the thriller The Formula, where he worked with two of Hollywood’s most legendary difficult actors, Marlon Brando and George C. Scott, so perhaps having experienced that and with no real prior comedy background, he just left Belushi and Aykroyd to their own devices, and trusted the results. Still Avildsen and Belushi clashed, and I imagine the resulting film is evidence of the two men's indifference. Avildsen’s old Rocky composer Bill Conti, provides the film with one of the worst and most distracting scores in cinematic history. Witness effect heavy comedic noises that substitutes for laugh tracks! Theremin for when something wacky occurs! Et cetera. The costume and set design is pretty perfectly realized though.

Sadly, Neighbors would be John Belushi’s last film, he would be dead three months after its release from a heroin overdose. Columbia Pictures and the very successful producing tandem of Richard Zanuck and David Brown (Jaws, The Sting) had high hopes for the film, penciling it in for their big Christmas season release in 1981. After bad test screenings they increased the screen count in an attempt to accrue as high a gross as possible before word of mouth spread (a practically automatic technique today), and the film was moderately successful though critically lambasted. For a film with the pedigree it had: Director of an Oscar Winning film, the Brown/Zanuck team, two of comedies biggest stars at the height of their fame and the head writer of one of television’s most successful sitcoms, Neighbors pretty quickly faded from public consciousness. It was never given a DVD release, though a High Definition print does exist, as I saw the film via a broadcast on Sony HD. Unfortunately, and I am still of the opinion every film should be available in an easy to access print of some sort, this is one of the times that the film is probably better off forgotten.