OK, with autumn records completed, now we start the main course… Horror! This thread will be updated as new films are watched and new pieces sent out.
Of Unknown Origin (G. P. Cosmatos… 1983) monster/psychological horror
I found during the pandemic that revisiting and refining my idea of the guilty pleasure in movies was a helpful agent to my ever eroding mental health. One film I’ve screened no less than four times over the last 36 months or so is the George P. Cosmatos/Sly Stallone vehicle Cobra (1986). A futurist tale of violent fantasies where eroticism is glimpsed only for the viewer at the slickness of clothed, perfect bodies and cult-driven bloodshed, a film almost made as a 90 minute music video. You know, the sort of thing anyone should theoretically be heavily invested in watching as the world careens ever closer to the brink, chaotically away from anything approaching normalcy. I love it so much that I do what I always do: explore the careers of the chief artists behind the project, as completely as possible. I knew director Cosmatos a little*, he being the director of the ultra-jingoistic and problematic Christ parable Rambo II and the peak entertainment Western Tombstone, a film that when it appears on cable guarantees my butt on the couch for its duration. Next I did Leviathan, a sci-fi Horror that was mostly passable if not for the much better similarly themed Abyss that James Cameron did around the same time. Then there was Escape to Athena, a decent action comedy set in World War II with Roger Moore that is only worthwhile to those that are piqued with ‘action comedy with Roger Moore’ in the description. It does have a tremendous motorcycle chase sequence (Cobra similarly has a wonderful car chase set piece), virtually the reason I’d recommend it at all. Needless to say, I was growing a bit underwhelmed, that is, until I watched Of Unknown Origin.
It’s the story of Bart (Peter Weller), a lawyer who has recently finished renovation on his midtown brownstone home, a beautiful abode for his wife (newcomer Shannon Treed) and young son. It’s a clear keeping-up-with-the-Jones style splurge, the doing only a promised promotion at the firm can really afford. It’s clear his beautiful partner comes from money so he’s trying to make everyone happy, risking it all to put off the gleam that becoming a partner seems as much justified as inevitable. But once his wife and child leave for vacation Bart is left to manage the three floors that also now house a huge rat looking to cause havoc, a problematic addition to his life as he approaches an incredibly busy period at work.
By the time we’re steamrolling into the third reel, Bart’s perviously tranquil, perfect life and sense of self have been thoroughly ravaged. Returning to his most primal state begins to right the ship; professionally he calls his bosses bluff about his future at the firm just as the sparkling patina of his new beautiful, renovated brownstone and polish lawyer dress code are thrown out the window. The final battle is with the beast, as much metaphorical as it is physical, and armed with a makeshift homemade warrior suit of armor he descends to the pits of the house–the basement—where the rat has fully taken residence. In the end Ahab will fight his white whale (the film makes several direct clear references to the Melville novel to promote this reading), the question is if the sea and those he’s previously loved will know (and love) the man they will eventually return to. Or more importantly will he love them?
After screening such an odd duck of a film I sought the opinions of others—have I read the film like others have or is it largely maligned? The most I could gather through the usual online searches is that it’s mostly been relegated to a weird Jaws clone, just grossly inferior as who could take a measly, small rat as seriously as a murderous, near unkillable Great White shark? But this is a lazy, unskilled read, this isn’t just a monster movie, the real Horror is in the fake existence the rat’s presence threatens. Bart has crafted a day to day worth now in need of puncturing, the promise of affluence and domestication a numbing agent that Bart must overcome to kill his adversary and reclaim a real, complete control of his psychological and physical existence. In a way you’d take the lead, the great Peter Weller, an Australian, and pair the film with perhaps Australia’s greatest Horror creation—1971’s gonzo masterwork Wake in Fright—and see an evolutionary tie in double bill. Men going back to the land, wherever that lands, hoping that wherever that leads it is to a higher plane, knowing the Horrors that must be trampled through to get there. Here is total spiritual Horror, a masterpiece.
*He was also the father of Panos, the director of Beyond the Black Rainbow, the Cronenbergian sci-fi horror head trip and the masterfully deranged Mandy, one of my recent favorites in the Horror genre.
Siege (aka Self Defense) (P. Donovan/M. O’Connell… 1983) thriller/action horror
Given Horror’s penchant for providing frights in examining contemporary social anxieties, the last couple of years seem ripe for the picking. Because of this, it’s hard to watch a recent Horror film, especially the ones that garner the attention of film chatter online or in person amongst fans, that aren’t in some way probing race, class strife, or ecological/biological crisis. At some point though, you almost wish horror, as in the creation of actual scares or filmic excitement would return as the bellwether of the genre, allowing us fans to probe and dissect meaning rather than having it smack us in the face as obvious, and then thinking it alone delivers the work to greatness. I thought this a lot leading into this season, perhaps because for the first time in years I’ve tried to watch a bunch of recent Horrors, more than the usual 8-10 works any Horror fan will do year to year to keep up with the trends on an annual basis but a real run through. It revealed a climate where subtext is now generally just the text, and what a subtext would normally do—provide the film a deeper reading or more fruitful worth on repeat watches—is wholly gone or never actually developed, Horror directors now deciding that what they want their film to say is what the film should be as plot, never realizing that this is a rudimentary reorganization of filmic narrative process in creative development, and goes without saying that this will almost always deliver misguided, poorly made films.
I bring all this up for Paul Donovan and Maura O’Connell’s Siege (Self Defense outside its native Canada), an urban assault action thriller, because its reason for existence is abundantly clear, but when all is said and done, becomes cool additional fodder towards near (or actually realized) greatness instead of handicapping it at the knees before it even begins. The real life Halifax Police Strike of 1981, an event where police went on strike for 53 days to improve wages leaving much of the city without patrol, is the backdrop here. With no police and recent riots, the city placed on curfew lockdown, a right-wing fascist group patrol the desolate streets looking to terrorize and take hold. They take up inside a small gay bar and their provocative actions lead to a bartender dying. Looking to clean up any witnesses they begin execution style murdering the rest of the homosexual patrons of the watering hole. In the bloodshed one is able to escape and outrun their chase, eventually finding refuge in an apartment housed by (what turn out to be anti-fascist) liberals willing to help protect the man. The fascist group eventually spend the film laying siege to the apartment building, hoping to live out their violent, extremist fantasies in real life. Only guerrilla tactics and a bunch of real smart maneuvers can save the group, which, coupled with the cracking script and environment ingenuity provide a film with a bunch of really entertaining and inventive set pieces. In the end we’re left wondering a famous Rage Against the Machine lyric, “some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses”.
Coming on the heels of John Carpenter’s similar Assault on Precinct 13, made a few years prior to some proclaim—it’s one of his 4 greatest works to me—you can see where Donovan and company found a way into crafting a great genre film. With a pinch of the additional heightened political exactness it more than makes up for not possessing Carpenter’s supreme directorial craft. Carpenter loved the studied the studio professionalism of Howard Hawks, specifically his masterpiece Rio Bravo, and seeing both films (Assault on Precinct 13 and Rio Bravo) it’s easy to see how Carpenter, like Donovan, saw Action Horror applicable as a modernized Western. Donovan’s film is a bit more exploitative in nature, so its Rio Bravo template would be something like the lost Val Lewton produced masterpiece Apache Drums, a frenzied, often scary Western where pounding drums provide a steady beat to the terror of flames engulfing a small community outpost on the frontier being attacked by the titular tribe of the film’s title. Of course, the fascist nature of Donovan’s film makes it both politically relevant to contemporary audiences making the film highly worthwhile but also as a reference point to another film on this lineage, Green Room (2015) where again extremist right-wing thugs look to murder anyone in opposition, this time a band isolated inside a punk club’s dressing green room during a Hardcore festival gone wrong. All these films show just how worthwhile a knowledgable film history is, how all these things tightly interrelate over generations and how story, and action directing craft not being tied up in woke subtextual nonsense as an end all be all, matter. But also, sadly, how political movements don’t. There, evil things just never go away, and a film from 1983 can be as relevant then as it is now. Still, thanks to Severin Films, Siege is easily obtained on a sparkling new DVD (from 2021, and it’s steaming—with ads—on both Tubi and Amazon Prime), and maybe history can be recalled a tad bit easier with changes made going forward. Or not.
Mutant (J. Cardos… 1984) zombie/vampire
For all the discussion on political movements or subtextual meanings on Horror from the previous piece, it’s hard at some point to not begin dwelling on the works of George A. Romero, especially his feature film debut Night of the Living Dead (1968). It’s almost the archetype for my points both ways; its supreme attention of Horror and filmmaking craft giving audiences a genuinely thrilling and scary picture, but also implanting the genre with such a singularly ‘important’ work for scholarly study that its imitators would seek to begin making films about their politics first and foremost and never fully understanding that the verve of its interwoven story and subtle motifs were the reason for its great terrifying power.
Mutant, made by stuntman-turned-director John ‘Bud’ Carlos’, is a film that applies its politics as thievery to the aforementioned Romero, it doesn’t have much to say in this regard but knows that if it mimics Night of the Living Dead it can perhaps share a few Drive-In double bills or attain a VHS box blurb to pique enough interest to get a good return on its small production budget. It’s the story of brothers Josh and Mike Cameron, who in hopes to reconnect after years apart hop in Josh’s classic ’69 Mustang for a sightseeing vacation around the US. As ‘Yankees’ they quickly find trouble in the South and are run off the road by a group of pick-up truck attached hillbillies and then marooned in a small, nearby red-neck town. Attempting to find some R&R and a tow truck to remove their car from the creek it’s now half submerged in, they enter the only working business at night time—a heavily Confederate flag draped hole in the wall bar—only to be reconnected with their ornery road rage companions and get into a fight that needs police and small town hospital intervention. Amidst all this it just seems off, the town first of all is desolate and eerie, it’s not just a racist small town but perhaps one that also has contamination from toxic waste turning people into zombies who live for the night time like vampires. But the film, as political reading, is also off, its two central characters are white guys (unlike Romero’s choice for lead, Duane Jones) so all the racial stuff seems half-baked to down right silly. Of course, the lead actor is also low-genre (soon to be) legend Wings Hauser and our cop is low-genre (washed up) legend Bo Hopkins, so is it all worth it in the end for entertainment?
Well, in a word, no. Though being made by a stuntman the film is comically inept in its action set-pieces, and they’re few and far between anyways. Plus, as great as he always is, Wings Hauser is largely wasted here, mostly because the reason(s) outlined in the previous sentence. No worries, I’ll have more to say on him this month, and why I view him as Jeffrey Combs’ equal for supreme B-movie acting from the era. So if you’re largely unaware, just wait, his due is coming and the films to first explore his brilliance, in store. But in the end, I suppose he nearly makes Mutant watchable (and the film had us laughing in spots), and that’s a feat in-and-of-itself. Still, for completists only.
The Amusement Park (G. A. Romero… 1975/2019) psychological thriller
Talking a few days ago about George A. Romero’s debut I thought it’d be interesting to review one of his recent efforts, a film strangely appropriate to me recently in a number of ways. First, I’d been thinking a little about Tobe Hooper after a friend’s screening of Lifeforce, his gonzo big budget vampire alien picture, recalling that I’d prioritized it, and a number of additional Hooper’s around his passing in 2017. As much a shoring up of my Horror bonafides, as a genuine desire to explore just went wrong with a director who, almost right out of the gate had delivered such a titanic, masterfully scary work with 1974’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but then just released more or less worse and worse films the rest of his life. It’s something of catching lighting in the bottle, but also a few unfairly forgotten (Spontaneous Combustion is fantastic and could be played as a bizarro superhero movie). But it was a realization that why wasn’t such an exercise also done when George A. Romero passed the exact same year? I’d revisited Martin, what I feel to be his best work and then, not much else. I believed this to be a combination of both being pretty well-versed in his filmography already and a lack of actually wanting to see anything there that I previously hadn’t (pretty much anything—and including—2000’s Bruiser which I’d started around its initial release and ditched). But then I realized I’d never seen the film so appropriate for a man that’d made his calling card the zombie movie: a film coming out, or rather rediscovered, remaster and re-released 2 years after his death. Appearing at the Pittsburgh Film Festival Romero the filmmaker reawakened from the death with a ‘new’ film.
Of course, The Amusement Park had been made some 44 years prior, a commissioned film for the Lutheran Service Society of Western Pennsylvania as an educational film for the mistreatment and care for the elderly only to be quickly shelved after initial screenings left people, like I was after completion tonight, depressingly sad and pretty terrified. You wonder what the Society imagined they’d get from the man behind Night of the Living Dead, but still, the film, a highly surrealistic work where actor Lincoln Maazel sees his badly beaten and disheveled double recoil at the thought of reentering the world (here, represented by as the titular Amusement Park) that does nothing but prey on the elderly. Eventually his double does enter, and not only recounts his suffering, but the suffering of most seen over the aged of 65 he encounters. Small moments of hope are immediately crushed just as young adults glimpse terrifying futures in their own dotage via crystal ball and the coming of a death marked by the grim reaper the three horseman of the apocalypse (seen here as three black leather clad bikers sporting chains and billy clubs).
The film is bookended with an opening introduction by Lincoln Maazel himself as well as a closing that pleads to, in paraphrased Jarvis Cocker from his great Pulp song, “help the aged”, and you almost feel the film, as education, could’ve worked. It certainly is grim and scary, definitely the work of a revered Horror master, while also being an endlessly inventive piece of powerful film storytelling on a relatively small budget. As a swansong after his death, it revealed a real tenderness to his frights. Perhaps that was the other reason I’d neglected it, at least over the past few days (as I did want to follow up my previous piece quicker than I have). I’d opened with a few reasons why I’d questioned my allegiance to his work after passing, but a work about aging, caring for the elderly in a compassionate and tender way, so close to around his death, seemed the scariest proposition of all. I still feel this way, but would urge all to eventually screen it, it’s another of his masterworks. Long live the Zombie King.
Don’t Panic (R. Galindo Jr.… 1987) psychological thriller/slasher
The end of last season’s Horror binge produced a watch of Grave Robbers, a 1989 slasher that I came away buzzing as ‘perhaps the greatest Mexican slasher of all time’. It was a statement I assumed would produce the expected, also assumed caveat: a teenage slasher from the dying days of the original era is something to be taken with a grain of salt. It’s a cheesy genre mostly for Horror fiends only, so a lobbing over the fence with ‘greatest’ attached to it is a mere statement on the attractiveness of such a film for a ‘beer and pizza’ night, my usual failsafe descriptor for the low-grade, very fun times pieces of pure schlock deliver with friends in tow. This isn’t High Art, but it is high entertainment, an idea I feel the need to convey to describe the film Galindo made right before Grave Robbers. Reason being, Don’t Panic is even less serious somehow; being it’s one of the more ludicrously cheesy films I’ve ever seen, but man, was it a real laugh-riot blast.
Its humor mostly comes from the conceit at what it’s trying to ape; it wants to be a fun, gory teenage Horror movie that can make a boatload of money across the US. It was an era where this happened relatively regularly so this is understandable, but in the copies you get the twist: this is a Mexican film trying to capture what American teens like, so everything is a little strange and hackneyed. Coca-Cola and Marlboro signage is everywhere, there is hilarious stock Pop music and dress straining to create an environment that looks like a California school and, most importantly, is in the crosshairs of Nightmare on Elm Street, the great, iconic film this attempts to capture. It’s not a new idea, can you think of all the blatant Nightmare on Elm Street ripoffs? It’d make a Horror movie festival unto itself; Bad Dreams (1988), Night Killer (a hilariously bad Italian one), Mahakaal and Khooni Murdaa (ditto, but this time both from India), Satan’s Bed, The Fear (1995, a wooden doll becomes Freddy and it’s so close it even gives Wes Craven a brief cameo), Sleepstalker, Brainscan (love this bad one, see below) and Craven’s very own Shocker (it was in merchandising too, who can forget the early days of the internet that built a cult around unearthing a cheap toy made in the late 1980’s to rip off Freddy called ‘Sharp Hand Joe’?). This one is a little different, rather than reenacting a recently dead madman/pedophile, this film creates its ghoul from a birthday party OUIJA board game where one of our teens eventually becomes an appearing/reappearing decrepit Freddy faced being that kills with a bejeweled dagger. Only recent birthday boy Michael can spot it, and we know when because his eyes turn red and he sort of moves like he’s very drunk as well as, at times, totally blind (lol). The eyes and overall visions are actually sort of creepy (a person’s face extending from a TV screen ala Videodrome is another nice ripoff effect), but it’s hard to go the next step as he does look like Zack Morris mixed with AC Slater’s hair, only uglier (should I have just said Steve Sanders from Beverly Hill’s 90210?). He also, for some reason, spends a good portion of the movie trying to curb the madness on the run while wearing dinosaur pajama’s that a 6 year old boy would normally wear to bed. He’s supposed to be nearing the end of high school, or given how old he looks this could very easily also be early college, so, mixed with the clear English dub on much of the dialogue, the puppy love interest, and the eventual brandishing of firearms (what can excite an American audience more than that?) our story careens hilariously ahead. Michael must try to grab that dagger and plunge it into the supernatural murderer stalking Mexico City, err Southern California’s many denizens as it’s the only way to end the bloodbath. You can imagine how all very funny this is, so I turn to what remains in Galindo Jr.’s largely forgotten (if ever really known) Horror career that I still need to see with now two positive, fun reviews down? It seems that last one I truly need to get to is his earliest, Cemetery of Terror (1985), which from cursory research sounds like a Grave Robbers and Don’t Panic hybrid. So, yeah, I’m all in!
Brainscan (J. Flynn… 1994) sci-fi horror/slasher
Speaking of Nightmare on Elm Street rip offs, the passing reference to director John Flynn’s 1994 Brainscan found in yesterday’s piece had piqued my interest enough to a full fledged revisit, the first watch of the film since checking out the VHS sometime in the mid 1990’s. Foggy memories of it aside, I more or less felt the same as I had before, it’s an interesting premise—the story of Micheal (Edward Furlong, at the peak of his short career), a teen that’s lost his mother to a car accident (that is shown in memory to be near-hilariously graphic) and found his father constantly away at work deals with his isolation by turning to horror films and hard rock (hell yeah) with best friend Kyle. The pair stumbles upon a virtual reality CD-rom game in a recent issue of Fangoria (hell yeah, again) to only be terrorized by The Trickster, a character in the game come to real life that apparently leads Micheal’s in game alter-ego on/to murderous rampages. The film becomes as much a comment on violent or scary media warping impressionable minds when early scenes in which Micheal’s Horror Club’s (again, hell yeah for doing such a thing at school at that age) existence is threatened by an overbearing teacher who objects to their exposure to Horror as a gateway towards rape, dismemberment and general anti-social behavior. These were, of course, hot button issues in the 80’s and 90’s for parents and the PMRC both here and the world over, where such artifacts were labeled with the ‘Video Nasties’ moniker among others, and censored across the British Isles and elsewhere. Sadly, after most school shootings we have to revisit these claims, showing that no matter how the world changes, violent movies and video games will always be cited as the sole source of the problem for large parts of our political populace (however foolish that idea actually is). The actual film is mostly uneven though, it lacks the real gravitas it aspires towards, and much of the staged chills leave you wanting for just a little bit more. But, given the clear teenage target audience, what can you really say, it’s pretty average for the type and does offer a surprisingly uplifting conclusion, a fate many such films wouldn’t dream (nightmare?) of.
Oddly enough the film has recently seen something of a curious cult* build around it, not really based on quality, but more for the idea that it’s a film that explores enough themes that could probably warrant future additions or actual remake properties. Plus, it also got a blu-ray release, now paired with (the slightly better, mostly for the gore) Mindwarp (1992), essentially two films that could qualify for such a designation. As Hollywood continues to show it’s barren of new ideas and wanting to legacy sequel or remake everything, instead of touching the classics, why not go after the interesting (sometimes huge) misfires? Oh, because no one outside Horror hounds and Furlong fans (how many of those exist?) give two licks about Brainscan.
*And I’d be missing a huge point of this films appeal by not mentioning another of its true signifiers to its release era: the soundtrack. Back then such films were paired with a selection of new tunes by record labels to sell their new artists, now sadly a lost art in the steaming age. This is to say Brainscan has a top notch soundtrack; grunge and groove metal employed to equal measure, from peak tunes from Butthole Surfers (‘Leave Me Alone’), Mudhoney (‘Make It Now’), and White Zombie (‘Thunder Kiss ’65’) I’d have loved to have heard this at 14 or 15 and had my mind forever warped by Tad (‘Grease Box’, one of my favorite grunge bands, now often forgotten by the mainstream), Primus (‘Welcome To This World’), Pitchshifter (the grinding ‘Triad’), and Dandelion’s ‘Under My Skin’, which is a bit of a ripoff of Nirvana’s ‘Aneurysm’ played a few beats slower but would my impressionable young mind have known this? Probably not, and it’d have been glorious.
attractive variance 