BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE FIRST FAMILY OF MARVEL

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: once again, it has proven impossible to make a remotely decent movie out of the seminal comic book Fantastic Four. Let us travel back in time to the movie that, against all odds, is still the best attempt that anybody has yet made.

This is a story wherein, if you're the sort who'd interested, you already know everything I'm about to say. But please bear with me anyway, because the backstory is the heart and soul of understanding how things could have ended the way they did. Once upon a time, the idea of making movies based on Marvel comic books was at best a pathetic joke, and because of this, German producer Bernd Eichinger was able to snag the rights to the oldest of all Marvel titles, Fantastic Four, for a mere pittance in 1986. This was after one studio, Universal, had already sat on the option long enough for it to run out, and Eichinger would do no such thing: he actively pursued big studios to partner with his Neue Constantin Film to make a Fantastic Four movie that all would be proud of, or at least profit from. But in those days, there had only ever been successful feature films made with Superman and Batman, and they were much too fussy and costly for anybody to roll the dice on such an uncertain project as a superhero movie.

As the deadline on Eichinger's option, 31 December, 1992, approached, he finally concluded that since no proper movie would be made, at least he could make an improper one, and thus retain his option for several more years. Wisely, he teamed up with Roger Corman, film history's greatest artist at stretching a budget to the breaking point and then beyond, to help produce his minimum opus, which went into production on 28 December. Their target was a release date in fall 1993, eventually bumped to January, 1994, but before that could happen, forward-thinking Marvel executive Avi Arad found out about the project, and rather than allow the release of such a tiny piece of shit dilute the brand name of one of his company's toniest titles, he bought out Eichinger and Corman, essentially paying them more than the production cost of their movie not to release it. The option remained, though, and some 22 years after all of this happened, any new Fantastic Four movie is still a co-production with Constantin Film.

And so that explains why the officially-unreleased The Fantastic Four, the story of a man who can turn into a fireball, a translucent woman, a man made out of a pile of rocks, and a man with long-stretching elastic limbs would have such an enormously insufficient budget as $1 million, and why it is now only possible to watch it in the form of bootlegs copied from a single full-frame VHS tape that leaked somehow. That does not explain why, for all of its flaws, those forced by its outrageous poverty and those which were simple the result of sloppy B-filmmaking, it's still the best Fantastic Four feature in existence. But it certainly is, and by my lights, it's no particularly close battle. It's insane to use the phrase "good faith" to describe any aspect of this particularly cynical production, but I truly do suppose that the filmmakers put in a good-faith effort to make the strongest and most respectful adaptation of the comic book that $1 million could buy in 1993. Whereas none of the big-budget films attempted since then have had much in the way of respect for the material, or even basic human decency.

The poor bastards tasked with turning this business proposition into a movie were writers Craig J. Nevius and Kevin Rock, and director Oley Sassone; between them, Sassone's work on the Don "The Dragon" Wilson picture Bloodfist III is the closest anybody comes to an earlier film credit that suggests that they even actually exist. What they turned out is about as thoroughly generic as an origin story gets; in college, Reed Richards (Alex Hyde-White) and Victor Von Doom (Joseph Culp) were best buddies, and they decided to perform an experiment tied to the closest approach of a comet-like energy object called Colossus, which goes badly awry, killing Victor. Or does it? Of course not, but Reed won't find that out for ten years. During that time, he and his other best buddy Ben Grimm (Michael Bailey Smith) work on perfecting that experiment so they can execute it again when Colossus returns, this time without killing anybody. This involves flying Reed's experimental spacecraft right up next to the object; for reasons that honestly seem to be solely sentimental, they're bringing with them the now-adult children of Reed's college landlady, siblings Sue (Rebecca Staab) and Johnny Storm (Jay Underwood), and for a totally unnecessary dose of creepiness, it's clear that A) Sue joins the mission because she's been harboring a desire to jump Reed's bones ever since she was a child and he was a college student, and B) he's happy to have her join because he's now harboring the same desire, though thankfully it seems unlikely that he's been doing so for the intervening decade.

Things go amiss, they all get blasted with cosmic radiation, and they crash back on Earth with a new array of superpowers: Reed can stretch, Johnny can flame, Sue can disappear, Ben is a big strong rock dude (and is now played by Carl Ciarfalio in a suit). This is iconic stuff, Comic Books 101, I don't need to belabor it. Bitter that his condition alone can't be turned on and off, Ben leaves, and encounters the weird subterranean Jeweler (Ian Trigger), who has stolen a large gemstone vital to harnessing the power of Colossus, as well as kidnapping Alicia Masters (Kat Green), a blind sculptor, to be his bride. And Victor, now styling himself Dr. Doom and wearing a metal face mask to hide his scars, has popped back up trying to build a weapon using Colossus, and the four heroes must learn to channel their abilities to stop both villains.

All of that is messier when you're actually watching it, with the subplot around the Jeweler in particular feeling like it could have benefited from another draft or two. And, frankly, it could have benefited even more from having a more clearly defined villain than this original creation (there's no readily apparent reason not to have used the Mole Man, the very first bad guy in the Fantastic Four comics, who would have required only a little tweaking to the script). But for the most part, this is boilerplate superhero origin story shenanigans, albeit from a time when there were just a few superhero origin stories that had been filmed. The details, though, are anything but boilerplate: the stupefyingly low budget and fast-paced production schedule gives The Fantastic Four a boldly amateur charm, like watching a middle school play with infinite ambition to go with its near-complete lack of resources. The one place, surprisingly, that the low-scale production doesn't betray itself is in the costume used to turn Ben Grimm into the Thing: it doesn't really resemble a man of rocks very much (he looks like a '70s linoleum pattern come to life), but the mechanics of the face are surprisingly functional in the mouth and eyebrows, and Ciarfalio's physical performance is the best in the movie, making the suit itself seem flexible and organic.

The rest of the effects are, unsurprisingly, quite dreadful, with the Human Torch realised primarily through judicious cutting and Mr. Fantastic's stretching arms a comically awful rubber prop (transforming Sue Storm into the Invisible Woman is pretty straightforward, using techniques pioneered in the 1900s, but it's also totally unimaginative). And the costumes, sets, and makeup (the garish white patches of hair designed to make Hyde-White look old are especially unpersuasive) are plainly not up to the demands of a broad-scale superhero movie, looking like a bunch of Midwestern ladies whipped them up over the weekend.

Where the cheapness shines, though, is in the unmodulated, one-take performances, ranging from the professor (George Gaynes) in the first scenes whose enunciation is delightfully stiff and formal (pronouncing "radioactive" as two discrete words is my favorite), to the '50s sitcom bigness of the doctor (Robert Beuth) who overreacts to the team's curious physical conditions, to the leads themselves. Hyde-White is generically unctuous, and Smith is actually good, insofar as the role gives him anything to be good with. But the other leads are all over the map, with Underwood screaming like a tweaked-out junkie and Culp hamming and camping it up like Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers films, only done deadly straight. The sheer ebullience of the performances is totally unacceptable, but so joyfully bad and low-rent that it gives the film a genuine personality as the kind of bad movie that everybody involved plunged right into rather than felt their way through cautiously. And that is the best kind of bad movie. It's hokey as all hell, the final act is made of pure idiocy (culminating with the Human Torch, in the form of ghastly CGI, outraces a laser beam) reliant on clichés every step of the way, and there's simply no way for the action to look like anything but people bumbling about in underlit sets, but through all of this, The Fantastic Four is surprisingly cheery and committed to the cheap world it barely builds. And this is better than can be said for any of the subsequent attempts at doing the same material on a halfway-decent scale.

Read More

SUMMER OF BLOOD: THE SLASHER FILM - A REAL NAIL-BITER

So you'd have to be such an idiot that there's not a word for it in English to expect a film titled Nail Gun Massacre to be even a little bit classy. Still, the speed with which it reveals the incorrigible depths to which its not-classiness reveals itself caught me by surprise - it's not just any movie that opens with a gang rape, and by "opens with a gang rape", I don't mean that's what happens in the first scene. I mean that's what happens in the literal first second of the film's running time.

And with that jolly kick-off, I welcome you to the absolute dregs of human artistry: direct-to-video horror movies in the 1980s. The great slasher boom had largely exhausted itself by the end of 1984, just in time for the newly expanding home video market to create a new, if even cheaper and more threadbare opening for for savvy producers with a halfway decent make-up artist and a couple young actresses willing to take their tops off. It was a grubbier world with fewer rules and smaller budgets, attracting and thriving on a lower tier of talent than was necessary to pass theatrical muster. This resulted in some of the tackiest, tawdriest movies in the history of the medium as well as some of the most impossibly ill-made. Even within that company, though, Nail Gun Massacre is something special. There is not a more inappropriate word than "special". I'm sorry. That's just horrible writing.

But faced with the garishness of a movie depicting a rape in its opening frame, and only gets worse and more exploitative from there, language itself starts to break down a bit. You know that feeling when you're watching a movie for the first time, and you can already tells that it's one for the ages? Nail Gun Massacre is the opposite of that. In my notes I had written down "this is the fucking worst" before the 10-minute mark, and "this is THE FUCKING WORST MOVIE IN HISTORY" around an hour in. That's probably hyperbole. It is, however, the worst movie of the 1980s. I'm very comfortable and confident in making that claim, and I don't give a shit if I haven't seen every movie of the 1980s yet.

An attempt to describe in prose the experience of watching the film would be titanically boring, since there is virtually no plot, and the little bit that scrapes its way through, the film tries very, very hard to keep hidden. So it begins, a propos of nothing, with a gang rape, yes? And then people start dying? Unless this was to be some manner of confrontational, experimental anti-narrative, in which unrelated events take place in an arbitrary order, we can be forgiven for assuming that the murders are an act of vengeance for the rape. That's basic, 1+1=2 logic. Even the briefest, monosyllabic summary of Terry Lofton's heavily reduced script implies that motivation for this particular massacre. The movie pretends that we haven't figured that out for almost 70 minutes. This movie is a grand total of 85 minutes long. That's a repellent amount of stalling for a story that literally could not function without its "secret" being obvious from the opening, and the scene in which Doc (Rocky Patterson), the thirtysomething doctor in a small Texas town who is the closest the movie has to a hero, explains his realisation is static, maddeningly dull, and criminally mis-performed by Patterson, who like every member of the cast seems to be reciting lines that he can't begin to parse and never memorised. Elsewhere in the film, two men who were part of the original crime say their goodbyes to the visibly hostile owner of a lumberyard (Beau Leland), who mutters under his breath "I'll see you sooner than you think" with a snarl on his face. GEE I WONDER WHO THE KILLER MIGHT BE. And the film acts as though we didn't notice that, either.

There is one possibility I can imagine that might justify all this as anything but rank incompetence: co-directors Lofton and Bill Leslie were aware that the audience only cared about the killing scenes, and gave the plot away to let the audience stay ahead of the story and enjoy the ride, like Hitchcock and Vertigo. It's certainly the cast that Lofton and Leslie were only interested in staging murders; God knows there's little enough else that happens in the movie. I've already punted on trying to explain the story, but if I were going to, it would be something like this: men, usually two, who presumably had something to do with the rape - the movie doesn't try very hard to make sure we recognise characters from the opening scene, up to and including the victim, and the killer attacks plenty of people who had absolutely nothing to do with, including no fewer than five women, which I think spoils his feminist bona fides - are in an isolated location. They are approached, in a comically abrupt fashion, by a wiry little man in camouflage and a jet black motorcycle helmet with the eyepiece covered in gaffer tape, and with a ludicrous synthed-up voice that sounds like a cross between Darth Vader, Jeff Foxworthy, and Ben Stein. He quickly kills one of them with the nail gun he has handy, and then spouts several sentences. Some of them quips; fewer of them puns than you'd think. "You should never hitch a ride with a hearse, unless you're dying", he snaps to a hitchhiker to tried to thumb a ride, which is A) not funny and B) not wordplay. Oh, and the bit about the hearse is because the killer drives a hearse that has been painted bright gold. It says so much about Nail Gun Massacre that I almost forgot to mention a detail like that. He then kills the other person, if there were two, and quips some more.

As a palate cleanser in between these evocative scenes of people slumping to the ground with the heads of nails glued unpersuasive to their faces with red food dye being dribbled on their skin, we encounter Doc and the Sheriff (Ron Queen) executing the most aimless murder investigation in the annals of crime, which consists mostly of swapping the observations "[chaws thoughtfully] We nev'r used ta have this many killin's". "[nods, or just stares glassily for about ten seconds] Lot of 'um happening on Old Lady Bailey's property. Wonder if we should go to th' house". "Aww, you don't think Old Lady Bailey has anything to do-" "Course not".

Along the way, we're introduced to a panoply of non-actors of the most awe-inspiring sort. I'm particularly fond of the helpless soul who delivers the line, "Well Tom, in your infinite wisdom, I'm sure you will figure it out in due time" without seeming to know the meaning of any word in that sentence other than "Well" and "I'm". But the clear standouts are Frances Heard (Terry Lofton's grandma!) as a shopkeeper who keeps adjusting her glasses and fearlessly marches on through her pointless expository lines even after she fluffs some of them, and an old man whose identity I cannot certainly attest to (the credits are full of vague descriptions with #1 and #2 following almost all of them) who loudly mumbles with the most impenetrable Southern accent I've encountered in movies in a long while.

Not helping the actors at all, the scenes that don't involve people dying have a nasty tendency to stretch to several minutes a moment that could have been dealt with in half of a line, and frequently could have been snipped out of the film entirely. Such as the great "getting directions" scene, with the dialogue being largely drowned out by background traffic noise. But slamming the film for its technical limitations would be like kicking a beagle puppy. And insulting the directors for their lifeless camera would be pointless, almost as pointless as losing interest in the action altogether to blandly zoom into a naked pair of breasts.

Oh! That's another thing, the porn! Twice, the movie stops being an addled collection of shoddy death scenes and a glacial depiction of the minutiae of human conversation to watch people having simulated sex. And in real time. In fairness, assuming that the cast was hired because of their experience in regionally-produced rural Texas pornography answers most of my objections to the acting, but I don't think that's fair to assume. Anyway, the end of the first sex scene is my favorite part of the whole movie: the dude is lying there dead, and the woman falls on top of him, and the image simply refuses to move or cut for tens of seconds, all while the framing pretty much insists that we notice that their pubic hair is extremely visible in both cases.

This is the most bitterly functional kind of slasher movie that could possibly be: a weak pretext that's only followed about half of the time for a lengthy chain of killings with almost nothing else that could possibly constitute a narrative. It is vile, and it is sleazy, and it is insufferably slow moving nearly all of the time. There is one and only one saving grace to any of this: it is also indescribably ill-made. The acting, the writing, the staging - it's amateurs and first-timers, mixed with an awful degree of cynicism about the market sector the film is targeting. It is, frequently, truly impossible to believe that the thing onscreen could possibly have been made, and it's so daft that it manages to be weirdly compelling even though the whole thing is rotten, from the core to the surface. I have never seen such a reprehensible slasher movie in all my days, but that's not to say that it's not transfixing.

Body Count: 16, and impressively, only one of those does not involve a nail gun. Truth in advertising!

Read More

SUMMER OF BLOOD: THE SLASHER FILM - SISTERS IN BLOOD

Look at that poster and despair! Every aspect of it - the purple, the lighting, the woman's pose, the woman's deeply inefficient clothing, and every last piece of text - promises a sultry erotic drama. The only thing, and even then it's questionable, that tips us off that it's anything even near to the vicinity of horror is the actual font used for the words The House on Sorority Row themselves. And I'm not the only one who thought so: writer-director Mark Rosman, for whom this was a labor of love uncommon in slashers of the 1980s was a vocal opponent of the image that, whatever the hell it was selling, didn't have a damn thing to do with the actual content of the film. Which for the most part is exactly what you suppose that a slasher film released in 1983 under the title The House on Sorority Row would have as its content. The sub-sub-genre of slasher films set in college housing was older than the slasher boom of the 1980s; no less a seminal text than the 1974 Black Christmas tells a story that's much akin to the one in THoSR, different more in cosmetic details (the time of year; the exact nature of the scenes that take place while the killing is waiting to start up) than in anything of substance.

Despite how obviously it would seem to be case that what you see is exactly what you get, THoSR has picked up a reputation over the years as one of the slasher movies that get it right. It is one of the handful of '80s slashers deemed iconic enough to win its very own remake, for one thing, in the form of 2009's Sorority Row, and it was one of the last breakout hits as the slasher genre started to run out of gas in '83 and '84 - just a mere $10.6 million, but on a penny-pinching budget of less than a half-million dollars, that was a pretty miraculous return on investment at the time.

The trick about the film is that it absolutely deserves its reputation, but it doesn't seem that way for a really long time. At the beginning, in fact, The House on Sorority Row seems to be at best a lateral step in quality from the previous year's crummy The Dorm That Dripped Blood, to keep it within the college slasher wheelhouse. It pukes characters at us without slowing down to differentiate them, or in some cases even give them names, and all the characteristics it bothers to deliver are enough to promise that we're going to really hate spending 90 minutes in their dwindling company. And even that's only after the film's greatly unpromising opening scene: on 19 June, 1961, a woman give birth via caesarian section to a baby who is grimly declared by the doctor to be yet another failure. A failure at what, we're not told. And if you share my particular set of hang-ups, you don't care, either: the sequence, intended by Rosman to be in black-and-white, was tinted blue at the distributor's insistence, which had the effective of accentuating some already cloudy focus, and it all basically looks like you washed your contacts in Vaseline before watching the movie. You know what's crisp, though? The sound. The sound is so crisp and hard and over-recorded that it just about cuts your eardrums. And of course, this is all so emphatically vague that you just know goddamn well that it's going to rotate back and provide the hideous backstory of the movie later on.

So that wraps itself up, anyway, and the movie picks up - still in a groove that feels like it comes from a battered library copy of the How to Make a Slasher playbook, but at least it starts to have momentum - to find the last day of school. Would you believe that it's 19 June? You had damned well better. Seven women, all seniors, all members of the same sorority, have stayed behind to plan a party at their sorority house, and in so doing are knowingly breaking the rules, to their peril: house mother Mrs. Slater (Lois Kelso Hunt, redubbed by Barbara Harris - and through no fault of either actress, the re-dubbing is the most atrocious, film-breaking thing) is a mean tyrant at the best of times, and she openly hates the girls in her care, which makes defying her a fools' errand. And this is not the best of times: Slater's physician, Dr. Beck (Christopher Lawrence), has just given her the news that her unspecified Condition is getting worse, and she should avoid stress, particular the unspecified Stress that exists back at the sorority house.

Coming back to find her unwanted wards fucking around, getting drunk, and having playfully smutty conversations is exactly the worst thing for Slater's mood, and so it is that she goes a little bit nuclear. This leads the girls, and especially queen bee Vicki (Eileen Davidson), to concoct a nasty plot: they'll throw Slater's omnipresent cane, with a nastily spiky decorative top, into the filthy pool she refuses to clean, and force her to dive in to retrieve at gunpoint. Fake gunpoint of course. But we wouldn't have a movie if the gun didn't accidentally have a real bullet after the blanks, and if Vicki didn't accidentally murder Slater. In a panic, and with a whole mess of people to show show up any minute for a going-away party, the girls, absent the requisite sexless moral one, Katherine (Kathryn McNeil), agree to pitch the old woman's body in the murky water and deal with her later. I pray that I give away nothing if I mention that during the party, the girls (and, for no obvious reason, one random guy) start vanishing, killed by a shadow wielding that same spiky cane, and by the time the survivors have figured out what's going enough to shutter the party and investigate the pool, Slater's body is missing.

It's enough of a frustration that this supposedly Actually Good Slasher Movie has such a somberly trite plot; the part that really annoyed me was that it couldn't even bother to distinguish the five sisters who weren't the obvious Final Girl Katherine, or the obvious Guilty One Who Dies Last Vicki. They are, for the record, Liz (Janis Zido), Jeanie (Robin Meloy), Diane (Harley Kozak), Morgan (Jodie Draigie), and Steve (Ellen Dorsher), and other than their hairstyles, I could not tell them apart with a gun to my head. But Rosman games things a little bit: when he separates a girl from the group, to have her meet her grisly end, that's when he throws in odd and unexpected grace notes of characterisation. In tiny little gestures, sometimes as simple as focusing on the actresses' expressions longer than seems natural, the film quickly etches out a little bit of something we should know about each of these women right at the moment we know that they're going to die. And then, in most cases, the film cuts to Katherine wondering aloud where [name] might have gotten to. It's ironic, of course, but the way it's repeated, almost like a litany, also serves a symbolic reminder that each of the victims has an identity, and they have at least one person who's actively concerned for them. This is small, but it adds a layer of confusing, "that's not what slashers do" depth to the proceedings.

Meanwhile, THoSR also plays around with our expectations by its stylistic weirdness. That Rosman had an attachment to the material rare in a slasher director, I have noted (it somehow feels exactly right that his career wouldn't end up in derivative horror, but in shepherding Hilary Duff properties to completion), and this resulted in some anxiety about doing unusual things with the camera - not always successfully! There's a slow zoom into Slater's unreadable face when she's staring down Vicki and the gun that is an absolutely wretched choice. But in generalities more than in specifics, THoSR benefits from a more subdued, watchful style than the usual flat-footed "hey, ya wanna see tits? Howsabout some gore?" camera-wrangling. And even that's not as noticeable as the incongruous Richard H. Band score, which is easily the most off-kilter music I've ever heard in a slasher movie. In and of itself, it's full of soaring, Romantic poetics, like an ad for diarrhea medicine that spends its whole running time focusing on gauzy shots of wildflowers, accomplished with generic hackiness. So it's pretty, but in an empty way - which is no different than pretty with structural pyrotechnics and complex harmonies, when the context for it is a run-of-the-mill slasher movie.

The textural strangeness that happens from the visuals and the music is enough to make THoSR an unusual, unexplainable experience for long enough that it's hard to get bored with it during its largely adequate first and second acts, typified by thoroughly unexceptional performances, too-long cutaways to a band playing at the girls' party, and murders that are significantly lacking in blood. And that is its most important trick - to get us to the third act without having turned on it. Because the third act - it's amazing. There's very little in 1980s American horror that compares to it. What happens, in the essentials, is that Dr. Beck shows up, knowing exactly what's going on, and he decides to set a trap for the killer, with Katherine as bait. To this end, he gives her a sedative against her will (and for this sin, he appropriately dies), and it apparently has a hallucinogenic quality as well, for what happens to Katherine's mind over the next ten minutes abandons any conventional mode of horror for a surrealist collage of image, lighting, and editing - tiny little jump cuts that feel like the movie is having a series of strokes, the disorienting impression that a little toy clown has instantaneously leaped to human size to embody the killer, and the film's most famous image, of a disembodied head looking up from a toilet bowl with a patient, knowing look. Some of these images are genuinely hallucinatory, some are real things Katherine sees, given a fuzzy abstraction thanks to the overall bugfuck mood of this whole ending gambit. But all of them are striking.

The end of The House on Sorority Row is among the most captivating, essential stretches of cinema in the whole of the 1980s slasher boom, fully justifying every minute of the sometimes aimless experience of the movie up to that point. A great final act following a slightly intriguing but mostly banal hour and change is hardly enough to make an all-time great genre film, and I'd rather have any of the top-to-bottom great slashers than one that peaks after making me wake for too damn long. But this is still essential viewing for anyone with even a little bit of interest in the overall slasher ecosystem, easily the best slasher of 1983 (not a high bar), and a demonstration that intentional, creative filmmaking can happen in any atmosphere, even when the limits of genre put firm bounds on how much that filmmaking is allowed to flourish.

Body Count: 9 humans and one pet songbird.

Read More

SUMMER OF BLOOD: THE SLASHER FILM - THE EX-BOYFRIEND FROM HELL

As this final Summer of Blood arrives at the slasher boom of the 1980s, it feels like a homecoming. For this is where we belong, truly: in the gutter trash world of miserably formulaic thrillers, propped up only by their most exploitative element and frequently by nothing at all. And while it's surprisingly willing to break with formula, director Joseph Zito's The Prowler, an independent release from the slasher's artistic peak year of 1981, certainly fits the second half of that summary. For the gore effects, by the justifiably legendary make-up designer Tom Savini, are as good as it gets, so persuasive and bold that they were cut to almost nothing by the reliably nervous censors in the United Kingdom, while winning Savini's praise as the work of which he is proudest from his estimable career. And there's damn little else about the movie that's of any particular merit at all. What the movie does best, perhaps, is to point out that just because a slasher film finds way to up-end and re-imagine all the usual formula signposts, it's not inherently the case that it will be good as a result of doing all of that.

And sure enough, The Prowler isn't much damn good at all, though it keeps promising that it will be, for serious, any minute now, just keep being patient. But it definitely starts out on the most unconventional footing it can manage. I beg you to tell me, how many slasher movies can you name that would have the guts to make this their very first image?

The next ten minutes are beyond doubt the weirdest and most interesting The Prowler has to offer; they're frankly among the weirdest and most interesting in the whole slasher movie Class of '81. And they are also typical of all the things that can frequently make the movie a frustrating, limited experience, since we find the movie trying three different times to start itself: first with this newsreel proclaiming the return of Our Boys from Europe following VE Day. Then it goes backwards, I think, to a letter by Rosemary Chatham, sorrowfully confessing to her boyfriend overseas (left without a name) that she just can't keep waiting, and she needs to let him go. Then it goes forward to 28 June, 1945, where the town of Avalon Bay is celebrating its graduation day dance, and we get to meet Rosemary in the flesh (Joy Glaccum), along with her new fella Roy (Timothy Wahrer), in a sequence that takes its nice, sweet time establishing the place of 1945 with remarkable attention to sound, costume, and behavior. It's not any kind of robust historical docudrama, or anything silly like that. But for a movie designed for no purpose other than removing teenagers from their dollars on the promise of violence and the odd pair of naked breasts, The Prowler's evocation of the '40s is surprisingly earnest.

Let us please not pretend that it's any more than what it is: the same exact first scene from dozens of other slashers, some of which had already been made by the time this film came out. It's the scene set in the past that shows how the killer started his career and sets up the scenario for the present-day sequences (no, tragically, The Prowler is not set in its entirety in the summer of '45; if it were, it's a dead certainty that it would be my favorite slasher movie of all time). And sure enough, just when Rosemary and Roy have sneaked away to spend some time alone, they're set upon by a man wearing the uniform of a U.S. infantryman, who pins them both together with a pitchfork. The attentive will note that this had already happened earlier in 1981, albeit with a different weapon, in Friday the 13th, Part 2, and in both cases the filmmakers were undoubtedly stealing primarily from Mario Bava's Bay of Blood/Twitch of the Death Nerve. Of course, that's because it's a great image that gets to the hard of the entire project of the slasher film: garish violence as a surrogate and punishment for sex. But it's also telling that in only its second year of widespread mainstream existence, the slasher film was already obliged to recycling ideas in such a conspicuous way.

The death of Rosemary and Roy throws us to the opening credits and thence into the future by exactly 35 years: now it's 28 June, 1980, the day of the graduation dance in Avalon Bay (this is a college graduation, not the more typical slasher setting of high school). Moreover, the day of the first graduation dance in Avalon Bay since that fatal one; Rosemary's father, Major Chatham (Lawrence Tierney, barely present), the town's foremost citizen, has spent every one of the last years using his influence to prevent the resurrection of this most hated reminder of his personal tragedy. But he has descended into weakness and senescence, and local student Pam MacDonald (Vicky Dawson) has spearheaded a movement to bring back the old tradition. And the attentive will notice that this also already happened earlier in 1981, in the form of My Bloody Valentine. For which we must surely only blame parallel evolution, though it's a weirdly specific case of that.

And at this point, The Prowler certainly becomes a much more typical slasher movie than the opening promised, though it still has some tricks up its sleeve. Pam has two roommates, Sherry (Lisa Dunsheath) and Lisa (Cindy Weintraub), who pretty neatly slot into "the slutty one" and "the pothead who's also, as it happens, the slutty one" stereotypes, while Pam is pretty significantly neither of those things. Pam does have a boyfriend, though, Deputy Mark London (Christopher Goutman), who has been put in charge briefly while Sheriff Fraser (Farley Granger) is on a fishing trip. And this will prove to be a very useful contact. See, Pam and Lisa are ready to head to the dance while Sherry's still getting ready and waiting for her boyfriend Carl (David Sederholm). He shows up, interrupting her in what I can only think of as a parody of the Psycho shower scene, and then a moment or two later is stabbed in the head with a bayonet, in one of the great triumphs of Savini's or anybody else's career. It's such a phenomenal piece of prop-making that Zito lingers on it well past any point of taste or even sense: as we watch Carl writhing and struggling for almost a minute against an attack that should have killed him almost instantly, it goes from scary to unnecessarily gross to silly. But it's never less than mind-blowing technique.

The same thing holds true for Sherry's death a moment later: she's attacked with a pitchfork in the shower, and it's filmed from every showcase angle that Zito and cinematographer João Fernandes can scrounge up. This time it never quite manages to round the corner to "silly", since this whole time the victim is wet and topless - in fact, The Prowler is unique to my slasher film knowledge in that its one and only boob scene is completely contained within one of its gore scenes. And that somehow feels crueler and more exploitative than if there had been some utterly extraneous nude scene just for the hell of it.

But morality and taste and sense all aside, the twin killings here are the best The Prowler will ever have to offer again. Back at the dance, Mark dances with another girl and earns Pam's ire; while trying to apologise, he manages to spill punch on her dress, earning even more. When she storms back to the dorms to change, she crosses paths with the man in the infantry uniform, and escapes from his clutches, after a discomfiting run-in with Major Chatham. And that's how, just about one-third of the way through its 89-minute running time, The Prowler has already entered, in a very vague way, its Final Girl sequence (as it were; this film leaves many more people alive than the phrase "Final Girl" implies), as the rest of the movie becomes an investigation by Pam and Mark into who the prowler and what he's up to (Sherry and Carl's bodies go undiscovered until the titanic pile of bullshit that is the movie's last scene), while just enough people trickle out of the dance to end up in the path of his bayonet and pitchfork.

The strengths and considerable weaknesses of the film are basically identical: Zito likes to keep things moving slow. When that results in giving Savini's gore effects a nice long showcase, or spending plenty of time building the '40s atmosphere that makes the opening sequence such a quirky experience, it's great, and makes The Prowler one of the most distinguished slashers of its era. But far more often, the result is a scene, stretching out for minutes and minutes, of nothing whatsoever happening while Pam and Mark stand around in the dark looking at clues and never putting together what's obvious to us from literally before the movie has even started: Rosemary's ex-boyfriend killed her and Roy in '45, and now that the dance is happening again, he's gone crazy and is killing again because of psycho killer reasons. Unless the contemporary killer is Major Chatham, raging against the bastard kids who've ripped open the memory of Rosemary's death. Either way, that leaves us with just two candidates for the title of the killer, and the one who isn't guilty vanishes out of the movie with no explanation.

But that's just an annoyance, sloppy writing of the kind that happens all the time in low-rent horror. It's the lingering that really makes The Prowler such a dispiriting experience; the waiting around in dark rooms for anything to happen, while quietly, sadly being certain that it will not. In the hands of great filmmakers, this would be potentially great material for turning the heat on real low and letting the film boil us alive; the tension crawling up our spines and making the movie almost unbearable by the end of it, in the best possible way. "Unbearable" would be overstating things - Dawson is an appealingly grounded protagonist for a slasher movie, and she helps to make the thing at least slightly interesting on a human level in between the moments that it's excitingly gory.

It is, though, atrociously dull, and that gets us into the neighborhood of unbearable, anyway. The film's unmistakble low points are very low - a random basement sex scene involving characters who are never thereafter heard from again, the worst imagined shock scene at the end that I think I've ever seen in a slasher movie, and so much aimless padding. So much. A film with The Prowler's specific strengths ought to be at least worth it for the genre faithful, and it is - but it is solely for the faithful, and only after they've seen enough of them that The Prowler's deviations from the norm can be seen and appreciated for what little pleasure they offer.

Body Count: 8, plus the horrible news in the opening scene that Glenn Miller's plane went down in bad weather.

Read More

SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR GETS MEAN - MEET THE PARENTS

Any honest accounting of the history of American horror filmmaking has to bow in the direction of the enormous influence of The Last House on the Left, the 1972 debut of writer-director Wes Craven and a solid contender for the title of most controversial movie of the last half-century. It is a film that links elbows with the two-years-younger Texas Chainsaw Massacre to go skipping down a primrose path strewn with body parts and pooled intestines, as the two most viciously nihilistic movies of an entire generation, the two movies that most directly and punishingly place the national psychic trauma of the late years of the Vietnam War into cinematic language, in which violence is shown as a depravity that makes you feel worst about life and yourself for having watched it. In terms of the marketplace, it triggered an enormous wave of knock-offs, and it more or less invented the subgenre "watch as the plot stops so that something absurdly wretched can happen to basically decent people in stomach-churning explicit violence".

Nothing I could say could ever take away the seismic importance of Last House in the development of a newer, burlier, nastier mode of horror, and I wouldn't want to try. That said, alongside its absolute, quintessential status in the genre's history, the film has also generally accrued a reputation as a great horror classic, on top of its evolutionary importance. And that just baffles the ever-living hell out of me. As I watch The Last House on the Left, I don't merely see a film that fails to be as good as it ought to have been - for that, we had better look to its altogether superior 2009 remake - I see a film that's borderline incompetent in all the places that matter the most, constantly sabotaging itself and robbing all of the impact from the handful of scenes that are able to accrue some measure of power. It's amateur-hour indie junk, not to put too fine a point on it, and whatever it manages to achieve as a powerful indictment of the human capacity for hatred and violence is nothing next to its status as a long lost Keystone Kops feature cut together with the world's shittiest folk musical.

Like all of the most grueling exercises in grind house viciousness, The Last House on the Left started life as an Ingmar Bergman film. The film is an uncredited remake of 1960 Cannes competitor The Virgin Spring, in which a medieval Swedish Christian girl is raped and murdered in the woods, her parents accidentally meet her killers and then kill them, and to cut off the cycle of vengeance and violence, her father dedicates her resting place to God and prostrates himself, begging for forgiveness, while the family's pagan maid looks on in wonder. Transfer the setting to 1970s Connecticut, remove the spiritual overtones and burning need for expiation, and hit Sven Nykvist in the head with a baseball bat until he forgets how shoot a movie that doesn't look like somebody dried off their sweaty testicles with the camera negative, and voila! You have Craven's attempt to fuse exploitation and documentary in one intense package.

It's the day before Mari Collingwood's (Sandra Cassel) 17th birthday, and she's got a big night planned: she and her edgy friend Phyllis Stone (Lucy Grantham) are going into New York City to see the band Bloodlust. It's a typical piece of adolescent overcompensation, trying as hard as she possibly can to shock her well-off bourgeois parents Dr. John Collingwood (Richard Towers, appearing under the hilariously ultra-WASP name of "Gaylord St. James") and Estelle (Cynthia Carr), and they respond with exactly the ill-concealed dismay at their daughter's life choices that she was undoubtedly trying to kick up.

Already, by the film's three-minute mark, we've encountered two of the things that will primarily ruin The Last House on the Left: terrible filmmaking and terrible acting. The latter, at least, is explicable: the film was conceived by Craven and producer Sean S. Cunningham (who would, eight years later, drop another bomb on the horror landscape when he produced and directed Friday the 13th) as an actual hardcore sexploitation film, deciding only at the very start of shooting that it would be better for their artistic aspirations (which were "indict a culture of violence and rape", not "get main in raincoats to whack off to a rape scene") if they dropped that angle. But they'd already assembled a cast entirely out of pornography veterans. And even though pornography in the early '70s was at its all-time height of sophistication and cultural acceptance, it wasn't a Petri dish of high-end acting talent. That being said, just because we can rationalise on paper why everybody - literally, every individual in the film who speaks lines of dialogue - feels like they learned their line phonetically and has only had enough time to think of one strategy for physical acting (which leads to a lot of fixed snarling expressions, like somebody just had a big whiff of smelly garbage and is pissed about it), it doesn't lessen the deleterious effect that has on the film's second and third acts.

As for the terrible filmmaking, it speaks less to Craven & company's lack of talent, than the apparently undecided approach the film takes to itself. The director's chief intent was, supposedly, to present an supremely artless, unmediated vision of behavior, capturing actions without commenting or looking away, and in the individual shots he and cinematographer Victor Hurwitz put together, you can see that. But the editing, by Craven himself (assisted by future slasher director Steve Miner), is almost comically incompatible with any of that, feeling every bit what an ambitious newbie would make in '72 if he wanted to be "artsy". It feels like someone absorbed the technique of French New Wave editing without paying attention to the narrative and structural importance of that editing, which leaves it choppy and discontinuous to no effect whatsoever. So, the first scene: cross-cutting between the mailman (Ray Edwards) sorting through the Collingwoods' letters and Mari getting ready to shower (so much for indicting exploitative male sexuality), and every time he says "Mari Collingwood" (postmen read the address of every piece of mail out loud, you see), the film cuts to Mari's face. To make sure that we know who she is, and that it's her birthday, since while there were other, more organic ways of doing it, none of them were as easy. It's downright hilarious, or it would be, anyway, if we were watching a parody and not an ostensibly gut-wrenching exercise in agonising terror. The worst thing is, this kind of clumsy stitching together of disparate moments using awkward sound editing and is a fucking strategy in the movie. It shows up many fucking times. And while it's happening here, we're introduced to another of the film's great sins, the music by David Hess; it's soft, elevator-style noodling without a melody, sounding perfect for a 1972 douche advertisement, and not so much a 1972 genre film.

So anyway, Mari goads her parents, and her dog - she says "tits" in reference to her snug top with neckline that goes right to her chin, and Dad gets offended that she says "tits", and there is I swear to God an insert shot of the dog looking up with a cocked-head look of shock, like this is a '90s Disney family comedy. It is possible that Craven's goal was to lull us into a relaxed state, so that he could hammer us all the harder later on. If so, he failed: by this point - and we're still just a few minutes into it - I'm just peevish and irritable. Anyway, Phyllis and Mari leave for the city, cross-cutting merrily along the way, having long conversations about their boobs that sound exactly like a 32-year-old screenwriter's impression of what he wants to imagine nubile teenagers talk like. They hear a radio news report about some escaped murder-rapists at large, including a line of dialogue that should be enshrined in the bad exposition hall of fame: "The daring daylight escape of the two convicted murderers, dope pushers and rapists cost the lives of two prison guards, and surprisingly, the life of a German Shepherd". Surprisingly! We meet those killers pretty quickly: Krug Stillo (our beloved composer Hess, kicking a career that would consist almost entirely of shadings of this same character), "Weasel" Podowski (porn director Fred Lincoln), Krug's son Junior (Marc Sheffler, who looks much too close in age to Hess), and Krug's bisexual girlfriend Sadie (Jeremie Rain). They're reprehensible and animalistic (animal imagery is used fairly heavily in their early scenes, in fact), and the first time the movie even flirts with the idea of having some kind of sickening power, though the music and acting - Rain's in particular - do everything they can to deny that power.

In the city, the girls decided to hunt for pot before they go to the show, and they have the immense misfortune to hit up Junior Stillo on a subway platform. He takes them back to the gang's ratty apartment, and it's all downhill from the moment they realise that they've just been trapped: "Oh shit" says Phyllis with the irritable tones of a woman who has just discovered that her husband didn't do the dishes like he promised, and no the ones of somebody finding herself captured by a pack of almost literally slavering rape-happy ghouls.

The criminals bind their victims and toss them in a car trunk to drive into the country for their awful fun, which of course means it's time to break out the kazoos on the soundtrack, as Hess provides the worst of his many songs, "Sadie and Krug (Baddies' Theme)"; it's a jaunty ballad that earns having the word "baddies" in its title through bubbly jollity and wordplay, and whatever ironic contrast the filmmakers were going for between the knee-slapping fun of the music and the gut-roiling tension of two young women being driven to God knows where to have God knows what done to them is not landing at all. AT ALL.

What follows is the source of all the film's notoreity and most of its actual terror: Mari and Phyllis are released in the woods near Mari's house, and being just barely far enough from safety that it does them no good at all sharpens the sense of nihilism as the two girls are forced to degrade themselves. Phyllis makes a run for it and is caught and killed; Mari tries to trick Junior into letting her go, and for her cunning is raped before she's shot to death. It is serious, grisly stuff, and it needs to be treated with utmost intelligence and dignity. But the movie has already shat that bed. Leading into this harrowing sequence with the worst music cue in a film that is hellbent on showcasing Hess's poor musical judgment is enough to dispel any controlled mood that the film vitally needs at this juncture. And Cassel is unrelentingly terrible in her role that it's difficult to care about the vile things happening to the character: she's no more convincing at being scared and in pain than she was at talking about her boobs or acting casual with her parents. The dead-eyed blankness and lack of self that follows being raped - that's the thing she's good at.

As shot, this sequence at least tries to reach the savage documentary feel that Craven claims to have had in mind. The handheld camera is loose and raw enough to impart a level of queasy potency to anything it lands on, and there are points where the accumulation of dust and dirt on the gate gives the film the look of harried realism, where the filmmakers were too busy capturing footage to stop and make sure that it was pristine and polished. Later on, the same thing happens in a context where it adds nothing of value, so this is probably simple incompetent filmmaking, not an aesthetic choice. None of this is enough to actually elevate the movie: the editing and camera movement still do a lot to pull the film's punches, even beyond how badly the film bungles the lead-up to this sequence. To compare it to the other most controversial of all movie rapes, the six-years-later I Spit on Your Grave blasts it out of the water: it's longer, more detailed, and the victim is someone who has actually come across as a legitimate human being elsewhere in the film, and the resulting sequence is galling and wretched and openly painful, where The Last House on the Left can at best hope to be gross and upsetting.

While all of this has been going on, the Collingwoods have contacted the police, who've responded with a sheriff (Marshall Anker) and his deputy (Martin Kove), and they are the worst. Both at policework, and at being movie characters. They're comic relief of the biggest, loopiest, broadest sort, getting into all manner of slapstick scrapes and making bumbling asses of themselves. That's all I have to say about them, but they take up an enormous portion of the brief running time, and every single frame that includes them is a liability at least as great as Hess's addiction to the most inappropriate music cues in history.

Eventually, the killers find their way to the Collingwood home, little realising where they are, while John and Estelle little realise who their peculiar new guests are. At first. They all figure out the situation, but the killers add morbid stupidity to their list of crimes by not supposing they need to get the hell out as soon as they put 2 and 2 together. That gives Mari's parents a chance to spend the night rigging the house with booby traps, and then arranging a bloody revenge against the four human monsters under their roof. It's a better sequence by far than the rape, since Craven has a surer idea of how to use visuals in concert with content rather than trying to pull his punches; the film is a bit less explicitly bloody than one might think, though that surely has at least as much to do with budget as anything. The inherent dramatic strength of this segment of the narrative compared to the middle - it's the difference between horror as a concrete element that comes to your home and must be exorcised, versus horror as a sort of free-floating state of suffering - was picked up by the creators of the remake, who emphasise that plot and the Collingwoods' mental state far more than Craven & co. ever do (the remake also has much better actors, so it can afford more nuanced psychological study. Here, it mostly feels like a splashy Grand Guignol finale that traffics in bloodlust and a surprisingly robust strain of rightwing class resentment - the killers explicitly detest the Collingwoods for their wealth, and they have been depicted throughout as a parody of hippie culture, which adds a measure of counter-radicalism that's not at all rare in horror, but is a bit surprising from an indie movie in '72. Not that I suspect anybody thought this through that much; like the rest of the film, this is all slapdash and trivial. The aesthetic choices are clumsy as hell, with improperly balanced close-ups and blasted-out sound effects, on top of dirty lenses (an eyelash lazily sashays across a protracted take of Estelle and Weasel chatting, as she prepares to bit his penis off) and the usual cryptic editing - the Collingwoods find Mari after all of five seconds of searching in their backyard, as far as I can tell - and stilted porn actor performance. And then it ends with a freeze frame on the pensive, blood-soaked results of violence without having an iota of the Bergman film's curiosity about the moral cost of vengeance. And then "Sadie and Krug (Baddies' Theme)" plays fucking again, over cheery shots of the cast. Because that's a great way to wrap up your harrowing horror movie.

And from this font springs much of the rest of American horror: exploitative violence and basically entered English-language genre films here, Cunningham's career directly influenced the explosion of slasher movies, and you can draw a straight line from the last scene to the torture porn genre of the 2000s. So basically, all the shitty horror traces back to The Last House on the Left, and that's exactly as it should be: shit begets shit. There's nothing about this film that I'd care to defend as worth keeping

Body Count: 6, not counting the innocence of the American filmgoing public, nor my patience.

Nastiness Rating: 4/5, pretty damn Nasty. That's adding a point, honestly, for the notoriety of the film. There comes a point when even the most visceral rape scene starts to disintegrate from all those pulled punches. Still, there's a solid 7 minutes in the middle where the film really can make it seem like everything in the world is irredeemably awful.

Read More

SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR GETS MEAN - BECAUSE OF THE HORRIBLE THINGS HE DOES

Herschell Gordon Lewis has long been known as the Godfather of Gore. In recent years, that nickname was used as the title of a documentary; Lewis has embraced it himself, adopting the name on his official website. In fact, the website goes one further: Lewis is, in his own words "the Godfather of Direct Marketing and Gore". Which is is one of the weirdest dual careers in the annals of Western Culture, but sure enough, alongside his invention of the modern splatter picture with Blood Feast in 1963, Lewis has decades of experience teaching companies how to use more effective active language in selling their product and inveigling customers. This sounds insane, but as I ponder it, it makes perfect sense: it's just two different forms of calculated hucksterism.

With that in mind, it's really not much of a surprise that Lewis jumped ship from the filmmaking game in the early '70s. It was a game he'd already played: as the relaxation of sexual standards led to the collapse of the market for "nudie cuties" in the early '60s, Lewis simply switched from titillating his audience through peek-a-boo nudity to doing the same through extreme violence. With the end of the production code and the explosion of low-budget gore pictures at the end of the same decade, it was no longer possible for Lewis to stand out in a newly-crowded field, so instead he simply closed up shop (only to return to the game in the 2000s, when he'd graduated to the status of living legend and inspiration to a host of grind house aficionados). After all, when there was only one Lewis, he didn't need to be good at all to be the best at it. And he exploited that reality to the hilt: his films are some of the most dismal pits of ineptitude you could ever hope to scrounge up.

We turn at this juncture to one of the director's final horror movies, made during the short window when he was able to really crank up the gory effects thanks to the loosening of moral strictures: 1970's The Wizard of Gore, which would have been an even better nickname. My sweet Lord, what a movie it is, too. There's not a genuinely good film in the director's canon (Two Thousand Maniacs! comes sneakily close, though), but this isn't the mere crappiness of no-budget regional filmmaking with a cast of the finest nonprofessionals who could be convinced to volunteer. This is rank incoherence, even worse than Lewis's notorious hatchet job cobbling the delirious Monster a-Go Go out of the incomplete footage of an unfinished production. And a more incoherent movie than Monster a-Go Go is one of those things that I pretty much assumed simply couldn't exist.

It sounds simple enough: Montag the Magnificent (Ray Sager) is a stage magician whose showy opening trick is to cut his own head off with a guillotine and re-attach it. This is merely the first of many tricks involving hideously dismembering people for the appreciation of tepidly interested audiences, but it turns out that Montag is secretly a murderous psycho, who actually kills the women he brings onstage, only he hypnotises them to think that they're fine. Once they leave the theater and it wears off, they drop dead. TV chat show hostess Sherry (Judy Cler), who is fascinated by Montag's show and wants to interview him on the air, and her journalist boyfriend Jack (Wayne Ratay) start to investigate the chain of inexplicable violent deaths. Straightforward "killer magician" boilerplate.

Move in even slightly closer than the broadest rendering of the plot, though, and The Wizard of Gore turns into a deranged slurry of aggressive stylistic mistakes strung together by the barest semblance of a plot. Like a pointillist painting, the incidents that make up the film's story appear to be a cohesive whole from a distance, but in the moment-by-moment experience of watching, it all feels like so many globules standing independently of each other and only barely gelling into something that's bound by rules of causality and chronology. At the micro level, The Wizard of Gore is a process of intercut sequences that follow the shape "Montag performs a trick, a woman dies later, Sherry wants to interview him, nobody knows why women are dying", over and over again. This pattern stops for no good reason; one imagines that the film could just as easily have been only 20 minutes long, or gone on for three or four straight hours, without meaningfully altering its impact. It concludes in a twist that makes no sense, and is individually redeemed only by immediately preceding a twist that makes so little sense that it turns into a soothing kind of Dadaist anti-logic, but may be meant to imply that we've been watching the unrealised fantasies of a murderous woman-hater all along. And that is meeting the film so much more than halfway that I'm walking up its driveway carrying a Bundt cake.

Its disastrous narrative is worse than confusing, though: it is unstintingly boring, as well. That's readily seen to by the constant repetition of basically the same three points with no consequences to any of it until suddenly it's all been kicked out from underneath, so that we can be sure that there's no consequences that will ever occur in all of the history of the universe. And yet, if all that was terrible with The Wizard of Gore was the disastrous structure of Allen Kahn's screenplay, I'd only hate it slightly. I might even find it enjoyable - superficially, most of what's bad about The Wizard of Gore is also what's bad about Blood Feast, and that movie is a hoot, in the short patches when it's not a slog.

The truly awful parts of the movie go deeper than mere writing. They go deeper than anything to do with merely poor filmmaking, though that is present in abundance. The acting, as is typical for Lewis, is bargain-basement amateur mugging, like the husband of one victim who doubles over weeping with his head in his hands like a parody commercial for a migraine medication, or the moment than an actress has to conspicuously feel around in her mouth before spitting out the hunk of red goo meant to look like her guts, or some such. Mostly people are hellaciously stiff and uncomfortable-looking. There is, though, one performance that goes off the deep end into some freakish other dimension, and that's Sager. It's not fair to blame him: he was but a young crewmember called up on the spot to fill in when the actor cast in the role walked off, and Lewis couldn't afford even a single day's delay. Being an untrained performer stuck with the film's biggest role and its heftiest lines was the first insurmountable difficulty facing Sager. Having absurdly ineffective makeup applied to his cheeks, forehead, and facial hair in a failed attempt to make him look old was the second. The monologues Kahn dumped in his lap are a third - long reams of zoned-out ranting about how all people care about these days are random acts of florid violence in their pop culture (that the film is self-aware enough to autocritique its genre is astonishing, given the pronounced lack of self-consciousness about anything else), which feel more like a stoned street preacher gone wrong than the menacing villain of a shitty horror picture.

Faced with these awful tasks, Sager called upon all the demons of hammy acting, and let forth with fiendishly potent blast of the most purple, flowery, magnificently mis-emphasised line readings it is possible for mortal minds to imagine. It's beyond my powers of transcription to even slightly imply the odd cadences and extreme shifts in volume that happen every single time Sager opens his mouth. His gestures match the grandiosity of his recitals, pointing dramatically like a bad stock player from Restoration comedy and suggesting that the Tin Man got stuck in the rain again. It is simply impossible to look away from the film even momentarily when he's onscreen; the impossibility that anybody might have let this go on for more than a few seconds, let alone filmed it, let alone cut it into the final edit of a notionally professional motion picture, demands every ounce of attention. It is horrible and painful, but it is captivating. (Bless her for trying, Cler attempts to go head-to-head with him in the final scene, but this kind of madness cant be taught, it has to be innate).

Even that, however, isn't the point where The Wizard of Gore runs screaming into the void. It's the way it has been staged - if, indeed, "staged" is the right word. That implies planning and intention, and I don't want either of those things to have been true. There's plenty of run-of-the-mill embarrassingly bad filmmaking: cutaways to a humiliatingly threadbare and barely interested audience for Montag's reedy show, flubbed lines left in of economic necessity, glaring establishing shots that couldn't be more obvious product placement for long-dead northeast Illinois fast food restaurant chain Chicken Unlimited. Which I insist on mentioning because it's just so goddamn goofy. Chicken Unlimited. Chicken Unlimited! I want there to be a synthpop flourish everytime I say it out loud, which I have of course done every time I've typed it.

But the gore scenes, the part of the film that is quite clearly the only reason that we're here: oh my God, they are impossible. This is what happens, basically, in every one of them: Montag brings up an obviously hypnotised woman from the audience. He blandly performs a violent trick as the audience watches intently. SHOCK CUT TO BLOOD SPLATTERING EVERYWHERE! THE MUSIC SHRIEKS IN ATONAL ELECTRONIC PAIN AS THERE ARE CLOSE-UPS OF SOMEBODY'S HAND MASHING AROUND IN SOME PIG GUTS DYED BRIGHT RED! SAGER ROLLS HIS HEAD AROUND LAUGHING! Cut to the very serious, solemn, bloodless version of the trick. The woman looks beatific. CUT BACK SHE'S SCREAMING! RAGEMUSIC! BLOOD BLOODBLOOD! PIGGUTS OH HO! Montag finishes the trick and everybody blandly applauds.

I have no fucking clue how to parse this. Not even at the level of who is seeing what - the sound editing alone is enough to suggest that the audience has also been hypnotised into not seeing the violence, and the victim is aware and conscious and screaming - but then, why the big deal about showing violence? What is even the point of the tricks, if there's no blood? They'd just be random, stupid bits of nothing happening. Which is certainly not something The Wizard of Gore is unfamiliar with. But then, if the audience is actually seeing the gore, why even bother cutting in the shots of bland, bloodless silence? For that matter, why bother cutting those in regardless? It's interesting almost solely because it's so confusing as to be surreal. I honestly think Lewis might have been trying to make a psychedelic splatter movie, bringing the art house and the grind house together in one package, only he did this without even slightly understanding what makes psychedelia or art films tick. As pure dizzying surrealism, it's only confusing, without being in any way atmospheric or haunting; it's like seeing a Dario Argento film remade by Ed Wood.

Reader, I hated this movie, and its languid, puttering 95 minutes bored me out of my skull. And yet I am inexplicably, even unforgivably compelled to recommend it with all the enthusiasm I can muster. It's terrible in every way - even the disreputable appeal of unflinching gore scenes is undone by the unconvincing cheapness of the effects (dropping some intestines onto a ripped dress does not, by any stretch, evoke the horror of pulling a woman's insides out) - but it is god damn weird. As weird as any movie of any extraction I've encountered in a very long time. That doesn't make the experience of watching it pleasurable, but Jesus Christ, it's memorable.


Body Count: 6, unless it's 7 - the twist makes it tricky to tell exactly who died and when. But I think it's 7. It might also be none at all.

Read More

SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR GETS MEAN - THEY'RE DEAD, THEY'RE ALL MESSED UP

As an inveterate lover of making grand historical movements out of molehills, it pleases me to know end that it's possible to pinpoint the exact year that American genre films switched from the classical to the modern age: 1968. In that year, both science fiction and horror made an immense, revolutionary leap forward, with a pair each of movies that made it simply impossible to take seriously the genre as it had developed to that point. Science fiction witnessed the radical visual effects and thematic density of 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as the philosophically serious treatment of seemingly frivolous subject matter in Planet of the Apes (which for good measure also boasts one of cinema's all-time most audacious original musical scores). Horror, which we're here to discuss now, had the very grown up, emotionally and psychologically grounded urban realism of Rosemary's Baby, which we'll be looking at elsewhere. Right now, we're just here to talk about neophyte director George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, co-written with John A. Russo, the movie that pioneered the most stomach-churning decency-violating taboo-busting violence that English-speaking filmgoers had ever seen. And if there exists, prior to 1968, any film in all the world with anything like the pure visceral grotesqueness of NotLD, I have absolutely not seen nor heard of it.

The film did not, to be clear, invent the notion of harder-than-usual violence as a selling point. As long as Britain's Hammer Film had been in existence, one of its biggest calling cards was a level of gruesome content beyond anything the quivering Yanks were likely to produce, and five years before Romero and company hit the scene, Herschell Gordon Lewis's Blood Feast was sold on the promise of literally nothing but the bloodiness of its death scenes, and is usually cited as the first movie to so centrally fixate on depicting gore. But Night of the Living Dead is in a different league from those: indeed, the new wave of violent horror that it kicked off served in no small part to kill of Hammer, which went from looking like the nastiest, savviest stuff you could ever scrounge up to being utterly square and safe almost in the blink of an eye. NotLD had the good fortune to come out in the exact year that the old Production Code was scrapped in favor of the vastly more permissive MPAA ratings system, which explains most of it, honestly. Some film was going to fill this spot in the movie ecosystem.

But NotLD isn't just "some" film. Romero didn't merely use his new freedom to shock with unimagined levels of blood and call that a good day's work, as Lewis undoubtedly would have in the same position. As would quickly become his wont, the director was hellbent on using his movie to carve open the guts of American culture, using violence and even the horror genre itself as a tool rather than an end. That's by far the most upsetting, vicious element of the film, even if its initial reception was hung up (fairly) on its explicitness. Decades later, the most violent moment in the whole movie, an orgy of cannibalism in which the innards of two victims burning to death in a truck are paraded around by a small army of zombies, looks modest and quaint, the kind of thing that would pass uncut on a basic cable network. It might actually be the least effective part of the movie to modern eyes, for while we've lapped the effects work several times over, virtually everything else about it remains not just fresh and mostly untouched by copycats, but in some ways acutely dangerous. This is a movie that knows what the rules are, and it breaks every one it can; it has an astonishing capacity, otherwise unknown to me in horror of this age, to seriously fuck with your head.

Should it be the case that you do not know the plot of this most iconic and necessary of horror milestones, let me give you the rundown: siblings Barbra (Judith O'Dea) and Johnny (Russell Streiner) have driven hours into the Pennsylvania countryside to leave a cross of flowers on their father's grave at their bedridden mother's request. Enjoying the chance to taunt his easily-spooked sister, Johnny points to an oddly shuffling man (Bill Hinzmen) and jokingly suggests that he's coming to kill them. The joke's on Johnny: that's exactly what the man is up to, and Johnny ends up with a broken neck while Barbra flees to a farmhouse some ways distant. Her explorations lead her to a gruesomely stripped corpse, and she effectively blacks out from that point forward, but the movie is taken over by several other survivors. First comes Ben (Duane Jones), hoping to find gasoline for his truck, who secures the building from the suddenly numerous armies of unspeaking violent humans; and then it turns out that five others have already taken refuge in the cellar: young couple Tom (Keith Wayne) and Judy (Judity Ridley), and the Cooper family, blowhard Harry (Karl Hardman), his plainly resentful wife Helen (Marilyn Eastman), and their badly sick daughter Karen (Kyra Schon). The seven prepare to dig in and try to survive the night, but a power struggle almost immediately begins between Ben, who wants to stay upstairs and defend the home, and Harry, who wants to bar everyone in the cellar and hope that the authorities come along soon. Of course, the authorities are a bit busy right now: as the characters learn when they turn on the TV and radio, the eastern third of the United States has been overrun by a plague of recently-deceased bodies reviving as man-eating ghouls, and other than some vague notion about space radiation, nobody has a clue why.

The key element of Romero's ...of the Dead films (there have been six) is already fully-formed in this first outing: when presented with a stressful and deadly situation that can be fairly easily survived through clear thinking and cooperation, human beings will much prefer to fall into in-fighting and mutual distrust, and thereby fall prey to an enemy that, rationally, doesn't have much going for it. The reanimated corpses are slow, clumsy, and despite some rudimentary ability to use tools and solve basic problems, not apparently very bright. The reason for the deaths that occur in that farmhouse are, each and every one, because Ben and Harry can't compromise.

As is the most spectacularly unoriginal observation I could possibly make, Night of the Living Dead serves as a parable of 1960s America, on at least two fronts. The one that smacks you alongside the head and then asks why your face has a handprint on it is the perilous state of race relations in the winding down days of the civil rights movement: Duane Jones was the first African-American protagonist of a horror movie in the States. Romero has consistently, to my knowledge, denied that he did this on purpose, and he only cast Jones because he was the best actor to audition for the part. Which is plausible on the grounds that Jones is far and away the best actor in the completed movie. But it is beyond plausibility that a filmmaker casting a role in 1967 in the United States would put an African-American actor in a leading role - especially this leading role - and have not a single thought cross his mind that there might potentially be some kind of socio-political reading applied to it. The film never blinks on it, mind you: while the driving force of the whole deal is the increasingly enraged hatred Harry feels towards Ben, there's not one line of dialogue nor even the slightest gesture in Hardman's performance that suggests racism is behind any of it. Still, symbolism will elbow its way in no matter what, and the sight of a schlubby, slumped-over, sweaty white guy spitting invective and bristling as a black guy tells him what to do absolutely suggests certain things in a 1968 context (and, I am very sorry to say, in a 2015 context) that are impossible to overlook. Much as the film's punishingly bleak final moments don't inherently rely on race for the narrative to make perfect sense, but SPOILERS IF YOU ACTUALLY DON'T KNOW HOW THIS ENDS roving gangs of white cops shooting at barely-seen minorities without stopping to wonder if they deserve to be murdered or not can't avoid connoting things that are angry and ugly about the way society works (and, I am outrageously sorry to say, possibly more so in 2015 than in 1968).

But the bigger thing that's going on, undoubtedly, is that this story about people ending up in an unsolvable situation and dying for no good reason, but doing an awesome job of blaming each other for their predicament is a curdled, cynical parable for the Vietnam era. As a billion people have already pointed out before me, NotLD paints a profoundly hopeless picture of smart people getting out of quagmires for one particular reason, and it not only gives the film more thematic heft, it works tremendously well to its benefit as a horror movie. Simply put, everything we know about storytelling, and everything we know about unpacking visuals in narrative cinema, tells us that Ben is the hero and he knows what to do, and Harry is a selfish, cowardly asshole whose bullying attitude puts him securely in the wrong. Jones's performance is steady and full of varied, vibrant emotions (the determined way he recites his backstory is beautiful, making it clear that he's trying to put an upbeat vibe into the room or at least distract himself), while Hardman spouts lines in a petulant whine; Hardman is lit and framed to look like a bipedal tower of flop sweat. And yet Ben's plan kills everybody. Follow the rules, be sensible, and use calm logic, the film indicates, and you're just going to make everything worse. As a viewer watching a genre film, that callous violation of the basic contract we make with every movie is acutely upsetting, a daring perversity that almost a half century later has only rarely been matched; as a commentary on the nature of humanity, it is pessimistic unto nihilism, but don't look to me for the argument that it doesn't fit the facts of the world of '67 and'68 pretty neatly.

Strictly as a movie, and not as a cutting political statement, NotLD makes quite a nasty habit of breaking trust with our expectations, and if that leads to some moments which are hard to take here in the 2010s, I can't even guess what it must have been like to experience them in '68. The film lets us know right away that it plans to insult conventional decency: the very first thing we encounter is Johnny bitching about having to decorate a grave, a pointless act of empty symbolism. It's a moment that echoes on the far side of a film with a TV talking head mercilessly declaring that the time for romanticising death is over: if a loved one dies, you had damned well better desecrate their corpse on the spot and make absolutely certain they don't come back to eat you, and bullshit funerary customs are now an unavailable luxury. And there's the other echo, in a moment that has lost not an ounce of its power to devastate, when the most essential family tie of mother and child is corrupted and perverted in a scene that should be ridiculously over-emphasised, with sound editing that goes so far overboard in exaggerating the horror of the moment that it's dissociative with anything happening onscreen. And yet no matter what mood I'm in or how many times I see the movie, that's the scene where it feels like Romero and Russo are playing with actual fire, and I'm seeing something so cruelly transgressive that it flattens me every single time.

Even in its more conventional aspects - and there are not many of those - the film is a superlative piece of construction. The hook is simplicity itself: pare away the new conception of the mindless undead as a biological plague (a notion Romero confesses to having lifted intact from Richard Matheson's I Am Legend) and cannibal holocaust, and this is a straightforward "stressed out cast trapped in small location tries to survive through the night" chamber piece. Though fairness requires me to admit that it's a story model that didn't really exist before this, not in such a purified state. But withing that limited framework, Romero and crew do a fantastic job of manipulating tension in the simplest ways. The more that we're meant to be frazzled and unnerved, the more acute the angle of the camera, either on its side or tilting up and down; and while this is going on, the compositions become tighter and more cluttered. It's inelegant, but it's not really trying to be anything else. And while the use of stock music is to be bemoaned as the necessary evil of a bargain-basement production (the only sign of it, in fact; this is a master class in making a hell of a lot from good implication, repressive camera angles, and a whole lot of game extras working for a couple of nights), the use of music, if not always the specific notes melodies at every moment, is nicely timed to throw us back and forth like a rag doll.

The film is a superlative machine for making you feel ragged, terrified, and bewildered by the essential hopelessness of the universe, but it does ultimately have a distinct mechanical feel in a lot of ways, I admit this. A huge reason for this is that out of seven characters, only Ben and Harry are in any way interesting (Romero's screenplay for the 1990 remake attempted to make Barbra a stronger character than the shell-shocked babbler she is here, which is at least one thing to appreciate about that film), and Jones gives the only performance of any real meat - which isn't a flaw necessarily, Hardman being one-night and inorganic contributes to our inability to connect with Harry and the film gets a lot of mileage from that. Still, an engaging story of humans it ain't, even though it's quite the fable of humankind.

There are also inevitable shortcomings that come with the minute scale of the shoot: small but distinct continuity errors (the newscast, for example, shows an interview in broad daylight that, by the film's internal continuity, had to have taken place after dark), takes that feel like the actor lost focus for a second and found it again, some obvious Foley work. But whatever Night of the Living Dead gets somewhat wrong is negligible in the face of how much it gets right: inventing a new kind of horror movie and a new kind of monster - though Romero never uses the word "zombie" and probably wasn't even in those terms, the film's success buried the old White Zombie-style zombie picture beyond recovery, and even a transitional effort like the 1966 Hammer production The Plague of the Zombies looks woefully old-fashioned in comparison. It is a bleak movie to usher in a bleak decade, cinema's all-time most embittered period in horror and mainstream cinema alike; it is one of the handful of truly transformational individual films in the medium's history, and a gripping, intense viewing experience on top of it. This is as vital of a viewing experience as horror offers.

Body Count: 8, defined solely as those characters that we see alive in the traditional sense who are later killed and/or turned.

Read More

SUMMER OF BLOOD: B-HORROR IN THE 1960s - PARTY MONSTER

There was always going to be a mash-up of the nuclear monster movie and the beach movie sometime in the mid-'60s. B-movie producers, as a breed, are too good at mimicry and chasing the latest fad with Terminator-like focus for the two biggest subgenres of cheap drive-in programmer to go unwed for too very long. It just happened to be Del Tenney, a moderately successful stage actor who reinvented himself as a filmmaker in the 1960s, who was the first of those producers off the post, releasing The Horror of Party Beach (which he also directed) in June of 1964, about ten months after American International's smash hit Beach Party first made the film a possibility. And how grateful we all are that Tenney shouldered his way up to the bar before anybody else could. It's easy to imagine a beach party horror movie made with bland competence, generic junk food that's a bit dopey and mostly forgettable, like dozens upon dozens if not hundreds of other horror movies in the '50s and '60s that aren't bad, certainly aren't good, basically aren't anything at all.

Thankfully, The Horror of Party Beach isn't any kind of forgettable generic anything: it's one of the great fun-bad movies of the 1960s B-movie circuit, high octane camp that's so ridiculous in so many ways that it's impossible to suppose that Tenney and screenwriter Richard L. Hilliard weren't at least slightly doing it on purpose. You don't cram that many unbelievably awful gags into a movie's opening 15 minutes if you don't want your first impression to be one of unrelenting corniness and fearless stupidity. For that matter, you probably don't lead off with the film's opening credits either, with all their stilted, hip flashes of car racing edited together with uncommon messiness and incoherence, while the soundtrack bellows out with singularly inauthentic surf rock.

It could also just be unbridled incompetence, mind you, an impression much sealed by the material that comes in after those credits are done. The driver of that racing car is teen-ish adult Hank Green (John Scott), who has in tow his girlfriend Tina (Marilyn Clarke), and the second the film properly starts up, they launch into a conversation that's a concentrated blast of badly-written exposition ("I know about your experiments in that laboratory!" is a line, and it ends up meaning absolutely nothing like you suppose it might) and deeply uncomfortable close-ups that appear to be trying to zoom all the way into Clarke's pores. Anyway, the film's inanities start hard and fast, and they don't let up. Not even five minutes from the start - that's five minutes including the credits, mind you - we've already seen the local radioactive waste dumping crew tipping big metal barrels into the ocean, and we've seen that toxic goo start to congeal over a skeleton in a shipwreck, forming into the film's monster with what I confess to be impressive effects work for a low-budget joint, though the comically severe "you should be terrified right now" music makes it rather more funny than even a little bit creepy. Nor do the superimposed fish help.

The first sequence is something like a codex of beach movie tropes as they had already congealed into existence, intercut with Tina's murder by the newly-created sea monster. So we get lots of alarmingly bad surf rock played with anxious determination by local band the Del-Aires, lots of alarmingly bad dancing as the extras Tenney tossed together gyrate randomly and with no obvious organic connection to each other or the music, and lots of ancient, wheezy jokes, presented as insert shots of people we'll never see again. At one point, the camera stares, hungrily, at a girl's bikini'd ass for several seconds before crash zooming out to a pair of filthy boys doing the staring. One turns to the other and says, with unfounded alarm, "That reminds me, did I bring my hot dog buns? That kind of wheezy joke. Hank and the local biker gang get into a fight over Tina, who retaliates by going swimming alone, where she gets assaulted by a suit that plainly didn't come cheap, but looks regrettably goofy, with giant Muppet eyes and a mouth that's all full of... like... feelers, I guess? It looks like a bunch of cigars stuffed into a novelty Gill Man dispenser. And despite the profound inadequacy of the monster and the appalling effects - the stuntman rubs chocolate syrup on Clarke's abdomen, and that's enough for the "violent attack" - Tenney stages this with extreme gravity and menace, all long-ish shots of Clarke flailing and screaming while the music goes hard. The tonal shift between the wacky beach shenanigans and the grisly killing could almost be brilliant, if it was handled with even the smallest measure of artistry.

The most amazing thing about this extended beach party opening is how much it has almost nothing to do with the remainder of the film. Hank comes back, and the monster comes back of course, but the great majority of the remaining movie essentially starts from scratch, with Hank's mentor Dr. Gavin (Allen Laurel) trying to figure out what the creature is so it can be stopped, while his daughter Elaine (Alice Lyon) balances her desire to make out with Hank and her sense of abashment that he's only on the market because his girlfiend was just horribly murdered. That's making it sound rather more clean and streamlined than is the case: in fact, the screenplay of The Horror of Party Beach is a deeply inelegant affair, a series of disconnected anecdotes roughly shaped into a plot-like substance. Some moments, like an extended sequence of three women lazily trying to escape this murderous hellhole for the safety of New York City, don't even have the decency to involve the characters or settings established anywhere else in the film.

Tenney charges through this aimless material, with its nonsensical technobabble (Gavin declares that they can use carbon-14 dating to determine the genetic makeup of the monster at one point, in one of the most overtly wrong things I have ever encountered in a movie that wasn't making a joke of it), casual racism (Gavin's made Eulabelle, played by Eulabelle Moore, is a cringing black maid of a sort already years behind the curve in '64, going on and on about voodoo), logic gaps, and colossal tonal shifts, and makes a movie that is, if never remotely satisfying as drama, at least frantic enough in its pacing to only rarely be boring. He's terrible at the nuts and bolts of directing: the performances are variable down to the level of individual line readings that end someplace different than they started, while there are obvious flubbed takes left in the finished film. And where any clever B-movie director would work hard to keep monsters that looked this stupid as a background threat, hanging around in shadows and fragmentary quick cuts, Tenney puts it - them, in fact, a detail the script doesn't explain - front and center, with even the most moody, atmospheric shots lit such that no matter how dark and threatening the backgrounds get, the monsters themselves are bright and wholly visible.

This is in keeping with the overall feeling of The Horror of Party Beach, which is that's some kind of ersatz object, barely a movie at all. It was shot on the beaches of Connecticut, but everything about it borrows from the vocabulary of Los Angeles-based beach movies, the original sin from which it never recovers: it explains the overcompensation of the opening sequence, the shrillness of the music, and the general uncertainty that crowds out every actor and plot beat. Movies of this sort were cranked out in the L.A. metropolitan area on a weekly basis, and the people there knew how to do them; Connecticut had no native presence of cheap-ass indie productions, and a constant feeling of "are we doing this right? Is this how we do this?" coats everything: the production, certainly its approximation of surfing culture.

I say all of that like it's a bad thing, but of course it is the film's chief strength. Lousy B-movies are thick on the ground, and rarely were they thicker than the 1960s; The Horror of Party Beach is weird enough and vividly incompetent enough to feel genuinely special and - I will not say "unpredictable", since every last thing about it has been taken from the nuclear monster handbook. It has an unconventional feeling, though, one that's not to its credit as a beach comedy or a horror movie, but is manna to the lover of weird, colorfully dysfunctional bad movies.

Body Count: 7, along with the entirety of a slumber party numbering "over 20", plus apparently dozens or hundreds of bodies during the monsters' reign of terror - the film is alarmingly bad at chronology among its other sins, and we have only the alarmist newspaper headlines to go on here.

Read More