Film Freak Central

Stigmata (1999) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image C+ Audio A Extras A
starring Gabriel Byrne, Patricia Arquette, Jonathan Pryce, Nia Long
screenplay by Tom Lazarus and Rick Ramage
directed by Rupert Wainwright

by Walter Chaw 1999 was an interesting year. The end of any millennium is accompanied by some kind of fin de siècle madness and the most recent one, in the United States anyway, was indicated by fears that the Y2K bug would launch our nuclear arsenal, cause airplanes to fall out of the sky, and end life as we knew it. It caused our movies to deal with technological folly (The Matrix, The Blair Witch Project, The Iron Giant, The Thirteenth Floor, eXistenZ, Bicentennial Man), shifting identities (Fight Club, Eyes Wide Shut, The Sixth Sense, The Virgin Suicides, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Memento, Being John Malkovich), and general apocalyptic mood (Magnolia, The Ninth Gate, Arlington Road). Looking back, everything we needed to know about the coming conflagration was here in these few years leading up to 9/11. Amid so many fine genre choices (Stir of Echoes, Audition, The Limey, and so on), consider Rupert Wainwright's handsome Catholic muddle Stigmata, a hyper-extended music video that makes no sense whatsoever but still works because of Patricia Arquette's ineffable grace and Gabriel Byrne's unflappable cool. In its own way, the film is prescient, seeing that its bleach-bypassed, Fincherian ethos would take over as visual shorthand for the coming apocalypse. Expulsion from Eden is this final surrender to digital wonderlands: we lost most of our colour palette along with our innocence.

The Car (1977) - Blu-ray Disc

*½/ **** Image B+ Sound B Extras B
starring James Brolin, Kathleen Lloyd, John Marley, Ronny Cox
screenplay by Dennis Shryack & Michael Butler and Lane Slate
directed by Elliot Silverstein

by Bryant Frazer America's love of the open road collided with its suspicion of out-of-state license plates in The Car, a risible 1977 thriller about a muscle car on a killing spree. The Car was conceived as a cash-in--an easy riff on Jaws with the working title Wheels(!)--but it earned a reputation for genre silliness that made it a staple of late-night TV line-ups in the 1980s. Shot mostly in the Utah desert, The Car follows sheriff's deputy Wade Parent (James Brolin) as he investigates a series of mysterious hit-and-run killings involving bicyclists, a hitchhiker, and a mean-looking, black Lincoln Continental. It's a low-octane concept even for genre knock-offs, and despite the traditional framing of organized law enforcement as the heroes of the piece, there's not a lot of detective work required. The Car shows up; the Car runs someone over; the Car drives away, blasting its horn triumphantly. It's not until it takes a special interest in Wade and his schoolteacher girlfriend, Lauren (Kathleen Lloyd), that the deputies concoct a plan to lure it out of town and into a trap, using Wade as bait.

Hackers (1995) [20th Anniversary Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A Sound B- Extras A
starring Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Fisher Stevens, Lorraine Bracco
written by Rafael Moreu
directed by Iain Softley

by Sydney Wegner When a baby is born, a universe of possibilities opens wide in front of them. They don't yet know how to move or talk, but they hold within them the capacity for good or evil and everything in between. No matter what, parents look at their children in those first moments of life and think, Here in my hands I hold a doctor, a scientist, a legendary artist, a Nobel prize winner, an Olympic gold medallist. Despite my own failures and shortcomings, I have given birth to a life that may manage to overcome all the shit I will put them through to become someone infinitely greater than myself. Maybe it will influence the lives of millions to make the world a better place. Though parents have a great effect on how they turn out, ultimately they are their own unpredictable and uncontrollable person. We know they'll change something, that they will affect the people they come to know, that this one small thread they represent will alter the vast human tapestry in some way. Of course, we always hope it will be for the best.

Howling II (1986) - Blu-ray Disc

Howling II: ...Your Sister is a Werewolf
Howling II: Stirba - Werewolf Bitch
***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A
starring Christopher Lee, Annie McEnroe, Reb Brown, Sybil Danning
screenplay by Robert Sarno and Gary Brandner, based on the novel Howling II by Brandner
directed by Philippe Mora

by Sydney Wegner Let's get this out of the way first: Howling II--a.k.a. Howling II: ...Your Sister is a Werewolf, a.k.a. Howling II: Stirba - Werewolf Bitch--is a mess, an entity that refuses to be judged on any conventional, objective scale. Though originally intended as a comedy, the studio sliced it up to come across as more of a horror movie, and the bizarre result is a tone that changes with each scene. Half new-wave werewolf erotica, half Hammer horror, Howling II's themes of grief and rebirth and female sexual empowerment swirl together in a campy, indecipherable whirlwind. Just as things begin to approach being scary, they're kicked right back down with a novelty wipe effect or a cartoonish facial expression. Christopher Lee, playing werewolf hunter Stefan Crosscoe, was allegedly so appalled by the acting of his co-stars that he spent much of his time offscreen trying to flee the planet using only the power of his mind. You can feel the ennui behind his eyes with every line delivery, yet the attention he commands is undeniable. In a way, his performance is a microcosm of the entire film. The opening shot finds Lee suspended in a sea of stars, reciting werewolf legend from a book, and that is probably the most normal thing that happens in Howling II. It's ridiculous, it's stupid; it's occasionally embarrassing and endlessly fascinating.

Dead Ringers (1988) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image B- Sound D Extras B
starring Jeremy Irons, Genevieve Bujold, Heidi Von Palleske, Stephen Lack
written by David Cronenberg and Norman Snider, based on the book Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland
directed by David Cronenberg

by Bryant Frazer Dead Ringers begins and ends extraordinarily, with the soft swelling of Howard Shore's title music. It starts with the slow emergence of strings, which are eventually layered with harp and woodwinds, mining uncommon veins of sadness in a major key. Set against on-screen illustrations of an anatomical and explicitly gynecological nature, the music serves the obvious function of undercutting the film's pointedly unsettling subject matter with unalloyed lyricism. It's like a statement of purpose. But Shore's melody goes farther than that, somehow. It's remarkably haunting, for one thing--the theme is one of the most potent sensory triggers I know, instantly evoking both beauty and despair. Just the first four bars are enough to set me weeping. And it's penetrating. More than elegiac, it's specifically regretful, and bittersweet. According to Royal S. Brown's liner notes on the first CD release of the movie's score, the director knew it right away. "That's suicide music," Cronenberg told Shore when he first heard the theme. "You've got it."

Scarecrows (1988) - Blu-ray Disc

*/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A+
starring Ted Vernon, Michael Simms, Victoria Christian, Richard Vidan
written by Richard Jefferies and William Wesley
directed by William Wesley

by Walter Chaw Terrible in that plucky way that earnest shoestring products can be terrible, William Wesley's Scarecrows has a few memorable gore moments and a lot of bad dialogue, execrable performances, and senseless exposition. I saw this movie on VHS in high school as part of my weekend ritual of renting a shelf and staying up all night shotgunning the dregs. This led to a few remarkable discoveries, of course--and it led to discoveries like this as well. The hook of Scarecrows is a strong one, taking the somehow-underutilized image of the scarecrow in the horror genre and making a grand bogey of it, but the result is essentially a zombie-cum-spam-in-a-cabin flick featuring a paramilitary group fresh off a heist engaged in a supernatural backcountry rigmarole. Still, the film's greatest crime isn't a bad premise but that it's boring. Really boring. Mainly it's boring because every character acts like an idiot at all times, making it hard to muster much in the way of stakes. That's also why Scarecrows isn't scary or tense, and because I think it wasn't long enough and they ran out of money, there are tons of filler close-ups of scarecrows just sort of, you know, hanging there. Kuleshov or something.

I, Madman (1989) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Jenny Wright, Clayton Rohner, Randall William Cook, Steven Memel
written by David Chaskin
directed by Tibor Takacs

by Walter Chaw I like just about everything about I, Madman. It's a pastiche picture coming at the end of the slasher era that cobbles together bits of De Palma and "Tales from the Darkside", tosses in some wonderfully cheap stop-motion effects, and stars the incomparable '80s dreamgirl Jenny Wright. Truly, it has everything. Wright is Virginia, a used-bookstore cashier (even her job is a super-nerd's idea of a dreamgirl's job) addicted to lurid pulps (sigh!) who is, as the film begins, reading a nasty thing about a "Jackal Boy" monster created in the unwitting womb of an unfortunate victim. Virginia's cop boyfriend Richard (Clayton Rohner) disapproves of her reading habits because of the states they send her into, but, Virginia being Virginia, she persists. She becomes obsessed with tracking down a volume called I, Madman, written by a certain Malcolm Brand (Randall William Cook). It's about a nutter who gets dumped because of his displeasing features and so he cuts them off. Alas, slicer's regret has Brand attacking women in an attempt to take back the missing pieces of his face. Turns out Brand isn't writing fiction, but memoir, and Virginia's interest in him has attracted him to her through the pages of his book.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984) [Special Edition] - DVD|[Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai
Buckaroo Bonzai
***/****
BD - Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
DVD - Image B Sound B Extras B-
starring Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Jeff Goldblum
screenplay by Earl Mac Rauch
directed by W.D. Richter

by Walter Chaw It isn't so much that The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8^th Dimension (henceforth Adventures) is hard to follow, it's that it's hard to assimilate. Once you're drawn into the deadly serious heart askew of W.D. Richter's film, its Gordian plot begins to unravel, its tangled web unweaves, and it becomes clear that the most disturbing thing about this legendarily convoluted camp masterpiece is that it makes perfect sense. That moment of clarity occurs somewhere in the middle of the fourth viewing, and while I can't necessarily guarantee that the trial is worth it for everyone, it was for me. Adventures reveals itself as a commentary on racism, an exploration of Communism in the Reagan era, a surprisingly influential genre piece, and a sly statement on early-Eighties excess and malaise. What I'm trying to say is that the film is holding my brain hostage, and I would like it back.

The Legend of Hell House (1973) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring Pamela Franklin, Roddy McDowall, Clive Revill, Gayle Hunnicutt
screenplay by Richard Matheson, based upon his novel Hell House
directed by John Hough

by Bryant Frazer Released in the summer of 1973, this film version of Richard Matheson's 1971 novel Hell House arrived during a transformative period for horror movies--especially British horror. The gothic trappings popularized by England's Hammer Pictures were being upstaged by the more contemporary settings of hits like Night of the Living Dead, which reflected America's misadventures in Vietnam in a disorienting funhouse mirror, and Rosemary's Baby, which brought Satanism out of the woods and into the city. Hammer tried to keep up with more salacious endeavours like the lesbian-themed Karnstein trilogy, but the old-school horror movie was pretty much put out to pasture when The Exorcist debuted at the end of '73. By some measures, then, The Legend of Hell House was ahead of its time, even though it failed to fully capitalize on themes The Exorcist popularized: spiritual possession, sexual abandon, and the failure of rational thought to deal adequately with supernatural phenomena.

No Way Out (1987) - Blu-ray Disc

Please note that these screencaps are from an alternate source and do not necessarily reflect the Blu-ray presentation.

***/**** Image B- Sound B Commentary C
starring Kevin Costner, Gene Hackman, Sean Young, Howard Duff
screenplay by Robert Garland, based on the book The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing
directed by Roger Donaldson

by Walter Chaw I was lucky enough to be 14 in 1987, right at that age where my buddies and I were dropped off at the theatre by our parents for whatever we wanted to see. Because we were generally not well-supervised in such matters, we talked them into buying us tickets for stuff like Hellraiser, RoboCop, Lethal Weapon, Full Metal Jacket, and The Untouchables. My first R-rated theatrical experiences were, in other words, magical. They were gleefully violent, extravagantly so, and the sex... Jesus. The sex in mainstream movies in 1987 was combustible--enough so that it formed the backbone of my onanism for the next several years. I saw Angel Heart this way, and Fatal Attraction of course. Key in there is Roger Donaldson's largely-forgotten but durable political-paranoia thriller No Way Out. Starring Kevin Costner, cementing a legendary winning streak that began a month or two earlier with his starmaking turn in The Untouchables and continued with the dead sexy Bull Durham the following year and the legendarily-chaste Field of Dreams a year after that. Lost in conversations about Costner's stardom during this period is his preternatural ability to be an Everyman sex symbol. Girls loved him, and guys didn't mind because Costner isn't really all that threatening. He sure is likeable, though. When he introduced a note of menace into his nice-guy archetype in A Perfect World, he in fact discovered his perfect role. The problems came when he tried to be something more than that. Cowboy, baseball player, fish-man, all-around all-American? No problem. Attorney, doctor--now we got issues.

Knightriders (1981); Monkey Shines (1988); The Dark Half (1993) - Blu-ray Discs

George A. Romero's Knightriders
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A
starring Ed Harris, Gary Lahti, Tom Savini, Amy Ingersol
written and directed by George A. Romero

MONKEY SHINES
*½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C+
starring Jason Beghe, John Pankow, Kate McNeil, Joyce Van Patten
based on the novel by Michael Stewart
written for the screen and directed by George A. Romero

THE DARK HALF
**/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Timothy Hutton, Amy Madigan, Julie Harris, Michael Rooker
based on the book by Stephen King
written for the screen and directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw Knightriders, George A. Romero's very own Fast Company, is another of the earnestly socially-conscious filmmaker's earnestly socially-conscious films, though one without the benefit of a metaphor that holds any kind of water. It doesn't even have an argument that makes sense. It feels like Romero over-identifying with the topic and losing the thread somewhere along the way--and padding the runtime with far too many pedestrian bike stunts. There's something to be said for personal projects (Romero's work seems like it's all personal, frankly), but with that intimacy comes real peril. I will say Romero's Night of the Living Dead is a no-kidding masterpiece. It's one of the best films ever made and perhaps the single most important Civil Rights picture, too. I'm partial to his Day of the Dead as well, for the cleanness of its execution and for the interesting things it has to say about identity and the military-industrial complex. It's fair to wonder, then, if Romero is tied so inextricably to the zombie genre not because (or not just because) of timeliness (and that he essentially invented an entire subgenre with a legion of imitators), but also because without zombies, his stuff is only leaden and clumsy. Without zombies functioning as they do, as both grand bogey and versatile metaphor, Romero's weighed down by a lethal payload of well-meant proselytizing, and just like that the flat artlessness of his films feels less "spartan" on purpose than "affectless" by accident.

Pumpkinhead (1988) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Lance Henriksen, John D'Aquino, Kerry Remsen
screenplay by Mark Patrick Carducci with Gary Gerani
directed by Stan Winston

by Walter Chaw F/X legend Stan Winston's directorial debut, Pumpkinhead is a strong piece with a few indelible moments. The first is when a country witch summons the titular bogey using the blood of a dead kid; another is when that same creature stalks past a kitchen window like an early draft of the Alien hybrid from Alien: Resurrection, with a similar miscegenated backstory. Between and around these high points is a boilerplate vengeance intrigue that literalizes the sins of the fathers in a Passion Play surrounding widowed dad Ed (Lance Henriksen), who, in blind grief over the loss of his adorable young son (Matthew Hurley), binds himself psychically, and physically, to the monster he's raised as his avatar. It's a Frankenstein story in that way, one with shades of E.T.--the bond between Elliot and his wrinkled flesh buddy is reconstituted in the relationship between Ed and an eight-foot monstrosity that's a little bit one of those naked cats and a little bit Giger. An impressive shot establishing Pumpkinhead as he strides into the skeleton of an old, broken-down church in blue half-light suggests more than the triumph of practical effects on a low budget and tight shooting schedule: it suggests that the film's simplicity could--should--be read as pagan folktale, complete with cautionary spiel, brutal exposition, and a surprisingly strong moral grounding. Pumpkinhead is literally about the impossibility of objective violence--every action, no matter how intimate or remote, has a spiritual impact on both victim and perpetrator. It's a surprisingly rich vein for something like this to mine, and it resonates.

Manhunter (1986) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring William L. Petersen, Kim Greist, Joan Allen, Brian Cox
screenplay by Michael Mann, based on the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon
directed by Michael Mann

by Walter Chaw Director Michael Mann's third film is the remarkable Manhunter, the second cinematic adaptation of a Thomas Harris novel (the first being 1977's John Frankenheimer-helmed Black Sunday) and the first to feature Harris's dark serial-killer antihero, Hannibal Lecter (spelled "Lecktor" in Manhunter). It is visually lush and possessed of the attention to craft and detail that has become a hallmark of Mann's work; to say that it's superior in nearly every way to the much-lauded and wildly popular The Silence of the Lambs would be something of an understatement.

Sonny Boy (1989) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring David Carradine, Paul L. Smith, Brad Dourif, Michael Griffin
original screenplay by Graeme Whifler
directed by Robert Martin Carroll

by Bryant Frazer David Carradine wears a dress and nobody says a word about it for the duration of Sonny Boy, a low-budget thriller set in a timeless Panavision desert where the preferred modes of transportation are dirt bikes and dusty pickup trucks. It eschews mainstream cultural signifiers--the one glaring exception is the blonde with tousled music-video hair and ridiculous outfits straight out of Desperately Seeking Susan--and instead dedicates itself to world-building, making its arid small-town environment a microcosm for the cold world outside. So complete is Sonny Boy's conception of a cruel universe in miniature that it comes with a downbeat theme song written and performed, right there on screen, by Carradine himself. (A lyric from said song* is engraved, I kid you not, on Carradine's tombstone.) Carradine is the big name, but the whole cast is better than it needs to be, and that makes a difference. They add a recognizably human element to an otherwise demented scenario and, even more importantly, they keep a film that sometimes feels almost like outsider art from amplifying its self-conscious idiosyncrasies to the point of out-and-out parody.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) [The Gruesome Edition] - DVD + The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
***/****
BD - Image A Sound B+ Extras A
DVD - Image B+ Sound B- Extras B
starring Dennis Hopper, Caroline Williams, Jim Siedow, Bill Moseley
screenplay by L.M. Kit Carson
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Walter Chaw If the first film is about living with malevolent ghosts--the sins of the father made flesh and leather, if you will--then the second is a cunning piece about the Reagan '80s: the fantasia, the nostalgia, the delusions of grandeur, the inflationary monomania, and, finally, the decay of actual values in a society believing itself to be the illusory City on the Hill. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is also a highly sexualized film, the American Psycho of its day, mixing sex with money until the two are indistinguishable from the great gouts of blood, bluster, and designer suits used in their acquisition. The picture's smart enough to be a commentary on its time while its time is still unspooling. Undeniably, there's something bankrupt about the morality of this story told in this context--the rise of corporations in the McDecade skewered as the monster Sawyer clan of the original launches a successful man-meat chili business with affable, no-longer-reluctant Cook (Jim Siedow) as its clown pitchman. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 can be read as every bit the product of its era as the following year's Wall Street and Predator--a science-fiction of regression and animalism that is not entirely unlike its star Dennis Hopper's Blue Velvet, also from 1986. It feels like the twelve years separating source and sequel (just like the ten that separate the first two George Romero "Dead" movies) mark director Tobe Hooper as a sharp sociologist when painting with this very specific brush, evolving the tumor of the Vietnam War manifested as a pair of lumpen bogeys on a young girl's back into this florid bloodbath erected on those conservative tent poles of mass media, mass consumerism, and misguided phallic projection. No accident, either, one supposes, that its central avenging angel is a dim-witted, swaggering cowboy figure, ambling in from the 1950s to win fights we've already lost.

Jack's Back (1988) - Blu-ray Disc

Please note that these screencaps are from an alternate source and do not necessarily reflect the Blu-ray presentation.

***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B
starring James Spader, Cynthia Gibb, Jim Haynie, Robert Picardo
written and directed by Rowdy Herrington

by Walter Chaw A quintessential dirty '80s thriller, Rowdy Herrington's frankly fantastic Jack's Back follows a Jack the Ripper copycat killer circa 1988 who, it appears, is interrupted during his last murder by earnest, likeable med student John (James Spader), who's quickly dispatched for his erudition. When I saw Jack's Back on VHS in '88, I was shocked by the brutality of John's murder and that it happens about fifteen minutes into the film. Rick (also Spader), John's twin, has a dream of his brother's murder and appears on the scene--to the consternation of John's grieving coworkers--to investigate the circumstances of his death. It's a fascinating conceit, or a silly one made fascinating by Herrington's execution of it and by a dual performance as subtle and compelling, in its way, as Jeremy Irons's turn in Cronenberg's Dead Ringers from the same year. Spader manages the neat trick of being two different people who aren't two easily-distinguishable types. You see the rebellion nascent in the "good" brother; you see the vulnerability in the "bad" one. Silly to say, maybe, but you see elements of one in the other. Spader's interactions with Cynthia Gibb, playing John's co-worker at a free clinic, are radically different from brother to brother, though not theatrically so. More than a thriller, Jack's Back is a brilliant character study.

Living in Oblivion (1995) [20th Anniversary] - Blu-ray Disc

***/****
DVD - Image B Sound B Extras B-
BD - Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Steve Buscemi, Catherine Keener, Dermot Mulroney, Danielle Von Zernick
written and directed by Tom DiCillo

by Walter Chaw A film carefully structured in three parts, Tom DiCillo's Living in Oblivion demands tired adjectives like "offbeat" and "quirky" while dancing dangerously close to hyperbole along the lines of "brilliant" and "incisive." What it is, though, is its own beast--a meta-structure of dream sequences (the first two segments "are," the third is "about") concerning six takes of scene six--the devil's number applied to the trials of filmmaking, including technical accidents, the egos of the stars, and behind-the-scenes relationships that threaten professionalism. With those plates spinning, DiCillo layers in elements of fantasy bleeding into reality (the second section ends with the oft-repeated scene sloughing into "reality," then into dream), the final segment integrating spoof symbols (an apple, a little person) with a real symbol (the mother).

The Guardian (1990) - Blu-ray Disc

*½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Jenny Seagrove, Dwier Brown, Carey Lowell, Brad Hall
screenplay by Stephen Volk and Dan Greenburg and William Friedkin, based on the novel The Nanny by Greenburg
directed by William Friedkin

by Bryant Frazer The Guardian, made in 1990 as an apparent attempt to cash in on director William Friedkin's reputation as the man behind The Exorcist, is one of those terrible movies by a powerful director working at the low ebb of his career. The wildest thing about The Exorcist--one of the greatest horror movies--is that despite its defining influence on his career, Friedkin has never shown much interest in horror. (That's one of the things that makes The Exorcist work so well: Despite the requisite special-effects outlay required to depict demonic possession, on one level The Exorcist is just the story of a problem and the professionals who are dispatched to address it; on another level, it's a family drama about a single parent dealing with adolescent rebellion.) So while it's understandable that either Friedkin or the studio bankrolling The Guardian would see commercial potential in a return to genre filmmaking, any attempt at out-and-out horror was probably ill-fated from the start. That the story being attempted (loosely adapted from a novel by Dan Greenburg) was so very woolly--the supernatural villain the title references is a sexy, polymorphous druid who takes jobs as a live-in nanny to steal babies from their parents--would have been an advantage in, say, a potboiler out of Charles Band's Empire Pictures. In the hands of a no-nonsense craftsman like Friedkin, alas, it was a blueprint for disaster.

The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Herb Evers, Virginia Leith, Leslie Daniel
screenplay by Joseph Green
directed by Joseph Green

by Bryant Frazer "I remember fire," murmurs Jan Compton, a disembodied head resting in a surgical pan, at the end of the first act of The Brain That Wouldn't Die. The moment comes about 20 minutes into a movie that's conspicuous in its cheapness (stiff performances, unconvincing sets, that particular lethargic pace that pads a Z-grade feature out to a bookable running time), and still it's chilling. There's a kind of poetry in the words--which refer to a car accident in the previous reel--that generates the shiver. "Burning," she whispers to the mad scientist (her lover) who has preserved and reanimated her head. "Let me die. Let me die." Naturally, he ignores her plea. And it's the tension between her wishes and his actions that generates the horror in this technically inept but effectively weird fright show.

Ghost Story (1981) - Blu-ray Disc

Please note that these screencaps are from an alternate source and do not necessarily reflect the Blu-ray presentation.

*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A+
starring Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., John Houseman
screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen, based on the terrifying best-selling novel by Peter Straub
directed by John Irvin

by Walter Chaw Jack Cardiff's reputation as a world-class cinematographer began, really, with the Archers, progressed through Hitchcock's underestimated, and gorgeous, Under Capricorn (every inch as beautiful a film as Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, and A Matter of Life and Death), and was maintained in collaborations with the likes of John Huston, Joe Mankiewicz, King Vidor, and Henry Hathaway. He did two films with John Irvin: the great Dogs of War, and this, 1981's seedy, singularly unpleasant Ghost Story, which represents the final screen appearances of Fred Astaire, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Melvyn Douglas. I think the biggest disappointment of the film is that it doesn't look better, given Cardiff's behind the camera. In fact, it looks like a TV movie (acts like one, too, as it happens); the possibilities of having Cardiff lens a classic ghost story in the gothic style are delicious and, until the last ten minutes or so, largely frustrated. Blame the picture's settings, various brightly-lit exteriors and contemporary environments (office buildings, college campuses)--even when the movie is in a grand old house, our aged heroes' Chow-duh Society huddled together in pools of shadow, scaring each other with spooky stories, the joke seems to be that someone is always turning on the lights.

The Dungeonmaster (1984)/Eliminators (1986) [Double Feature] - Blu-ray Disc

Ragewar
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C+
starring Richard Moll, Leslie Wing, Jeffrey Byron
written by Allen Actor
directed by Rosemarie Turko, John Carl Buechler, David Allen, Steven Ford, Peter Manoogian, Ted Nicolaou, Charles Band

ELIMINATORS
**½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Andrew Prine, Denise Crosby, Patrick Reynolds, Roy Dotrice
written by Paul De Meo & Danny Bilson
directed by Peter Manoogian

by Bryant Frazer Shout! Factory's program of disinterred but well-preserved artifacts from producer Charles Band's genre-flick factory Empire Pictures continues with this platter of aged cheese. I'm generally resistant to nostalgia and suspicious of claims that anybody's low-budget crapfest is so bad it's good, but the twofer on offer here is surprisingly engaging, juxtaposing a sloppy but fast-paced horror anthology with a silly but earnest action pastiche in a celebration of a bygone age of guileless indie filmmaking. While some of Scream Factory's excavations from that era are simply depressing (The Final Terror, anyone?), this highly-derivative double feature makes up for its lack of artistry with a generous helping of vintage latex creature masks, boggling non sequiturs, and 1980s signifiers that generate--at least for movie buffs of a certain age and proclivity--a strong sense memory of sticky floors, stale popcorn, and battered 35mm projection.

Tales from the Crypt Presents Demon Knight (1995) [Collector's Edition] + Tales from the Crypt Presents Bordello of Blood (1996) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Discs

Demon Knight
***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A
starring Billy Zane, William Sadler, Jada Pinkett, Brenda Bakke
written by Ethan Reiff & Cyrus Voris & Mark Bishop
directed by Ernest Dickerson

Bordello of Blood
*/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras A
starring Dennis Miller, Erika Eleniak, Angie Everhart, John Kassir
screenplay by A.L. Katz & Gilbert Adler
directed by Gilbert Adler

by Walter Chaw I didn't have HBO as a kid. Didn't even have cable. When I went over to friends' houses, I would spend a lot of time wanting to watch MTV to try to catch up on all the popular culture I was missing. "Remote Control", the first Jon Stewart show, "Dream On", "The Kids in the Hall"--each of them represent gaping holes in my pop education. Lump in the Walter Hill-produced "Tales from the Crypt" anthology program with that group of things I knew about but only by title and reputation. My first exposure to the EC Comics-inspired/adapted-from show was through reprints of "Tales from the Crypt" and "Strange Tales" comics during the early-'90s industry boom. Then Ernest Dickerson's fantastic Tales from the Crypt Presents Demon Knight (hereafter Demon Knight) satisfied every single expectation I had of something seeking to honour the ghoulish, sometimes puerile depravity of William Gaines's seminal source material. It's as gory as it is corny and smart as hell for recognizing that those were the only requirements. Doesn't hurt that the practical-effects work is goopy and inventive. Oh, and the cast is exceptional.

Nightbreed: The Director's Cut (1990) [Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack] + Lord of Illusions (1995) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Discs

NIGHTBREED
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring Craig Sheffer, Anne Bobby, David Cronenberg, Charles Haid
screenplay by Clive Barker, based on his novel Cabal
directed by Clive Barker

LORD OF ILLUSIONS
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras C+
starring Scott Bakula, Kevin J. O'Connor, Famke Janssen, Daniel Von Bargen
written for the screen and directed by Clive Barker

by Walter Chaw Clive Barker's too-brief directing career, capping his time as the Stephen King-anointed prince of horror ("I have seen the future of horror and his name is Clive Barker," went King's famous endorsement), produced three cult classics: Hellraiser, Nightbreed, and Lord of Illusions. His Hollywood trajectory traces the familiar tale of enfant terrible allowed full reign on his first project, only to find subsequent efforts bowdlerized by non-believers. Director's cuts of Nightbreed and Lord of Illusions have circulated in some form over the years, with fans claiming--particularly in the case of Nightbreed--that masterpieces had been corrupted, hidden from sight. It's the kind of intrigue that forms the basis of much of Barker's work: the hidden grotto, arcane knowledge secreted away, art too beautiful for human eyes. There's something of the fury of H.P. Lovecraft's cult of personality in this--something more of the cosplay phenomenon. Each of Barker's movies evokes the absolute acceptance that outsiders encounter at genre conventions: they are explosions of the internal, actings-out of repressed desires. Find in this explanation of the coda, surprisingly sticky despite the bad pun, to his short-story anthologies: "Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red." Clive Barker is the Douglas Sirk of splatter.

The Sentinel (1977) - Blu-ray Disc

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Chris Sarandon, Cristina Raines, Martin Balsam, John Carradine
screenplay by Michael Winner and Jeffrey Konvitz, based on the novel by Konvitz
directed by Michael Winner

by Bryant Frazer Death Wish director Michael Winner tried his hand at a boilerplate horror flick with The Sentinel, another in the long-running cycle of American horror films that doubled as scary religious propaganda, with the faith of Catholic priests the last bulwark against harrowing incursions by Satan himself on our mortal realm. It's not a good movie, but it has a hell of a supporting cast--Christopher Walken, Eli Wallach, and Ava Gardner, just for starters--and that specific, vaguely gritty time-and-place authenticity that you could only get by shooting on location in New York City in the 1970s. For this type of genre piece, that ensures a small kind of immortality, but Winner, indifferently adapting a best-selling novel and barely directing a lead actress who hates him, brings to it a certain je ne sais quoi that pushes it over the line into the sleazeball hall of fame.

The Food of the Gods (1976)/Frogs (1972) [Double Feature] + Empire of the Ants (1977)/Jaws of Satan (1981) [Double Feature] - Blu-ray Discs

THE FOOD OF THE GODS
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Marjoe Gortner, Pamela Franklin, Ralph Meeker, Ida Lupino
screenplay by Bert I. Gordon, based on a portion of the novel by H.G. Wells
directed by Bert I. Gordon

FROGS
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Ray Milland, Sam Elliott, Joan Van Ark, Adam Roarke
screenplay by Robert Hutchison and Robert Blees
directed by George McCowan

EMPIRE OF THE ANTS
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C-
starring Joan Collins, Robert Lansing, John David Carson, Albert Salmi
screenplay by Jack Turley, story by Bert I. Gordon, based on the novel by H.G. Wells
directed by Bert I. Gordon

King Cobra
***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C-
starring Fritz Weaver, Gretchen Corbett, Jon Korkes, Norman Lloyd
screenplay by Gerry Holland, from a story by James Callaway
directed by Bob Claver

by Jefferson Robbins If THE DISSOLVE had lasted, Keith Phipps's fine recurring genre feature "The Laser Age" might have gotten around to the SF subcategory of Nature Gone Wild--the movies that set animals against humanity, such as The Swarm, Night of the Lepus, Squirm, and Prophecy (The Monster Movie). Distinctly a 1970s phenomenon, as we fretted over the northward migration of killer bees and the health of our DDT-soaked bald eagles, the films usually boasted critters who turned on us bipeds after stewing too long in our toxic effluents, perhaps gaining bestial superpowers as a result. They were cheapies, by and large, although with The Swarm director Irwin Allen tried to pull off the same broad settings and large aging-star cast he'd managed in his previous disaster flicks. As a trope, humanity vs. nature works best in isolation, when solitary heroes or groups of victims are besieged in the sticks, with no outside help forthcoming.

The Legacy (1978) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Katharine Ross, Sam Elliott, Roger Daltrey, John Standing
screenplay by Jimmy Sangster, Patrick Tilley and Paul Wheeler from a story by Sangster
directed by Richard Marquand

by Bryant Frazer One in a spate of post-The Exorcist, post-Rosemary's Baby potboilers about ordinary people confronting ancient evil in the modern world, The Legacy has an enduring reputation as a big slice of horror cheese and not much else. Certainly, it's derivative--just another old-dark-house yarn set in the English countryside, spiced up in '70s fashion with a sinister, Satanic backstory that never quite clicks together. It's one of the last horror movies to come out in the handsomely-mounted classic style favoured by Hammer before contemporary slashers and body-horror changed the game completely in the 1980s, but what it lacks in originality and coherence it makes up for in comfy genre atmosphere. Co-scriptor Jimmy Sangster was one of the top dogs at Hammer Film Productions (his writing credits include Horror of Dracula and The Curse of Frankenstein) and Welsh director Richard Marquand was a BBC documentarian making his fiction debut (he would go on to direct Return of the Jedi). That's not a world-beating combination, but if you like your occult thrillers played straight, The Legacy's workmanlike style is an asset.

Ghoulies (1985)/Ghoulies II (1988) [Double Feature] - Blu-ray Disc

GHOULIES
**½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Peter Liapis, Lisa Pelikan, Michael Des Barres, Jack Nance
screenplay by Luca Bercovici and Jefery Levy
directed by Luca Bercovici

GHOULIES II
***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Damon Martin, Royal Dano, Phil Fondacaro, J. Downing
screenplay by Charlie Dolan and Dennis Paoli
directed by Albert Band

by Jefferson Robbins Not rip-off, not homage, but something in the water. Luca Bercovici's 1985 Ghoulies, from the lo-fi film factory of Charles Band, felt on release like a ploy to frack cash out of Joe Dante's Gremlins from the year before. In fact it had a parallel development, launching pre-production in 1983 under the working title Beasties and formally premiering in Britain in November of 1984. It also boasts a far weirder strain of presentation than Dante's peak, something Lynchian that goes beyond the mere presence of Jack Nance. It has its passel of '80s "teen" types harassed by horrors, sure: the stoner(s), the ladykiller, the nerd--not to mention their attendant ladies, none of whom are given much personality, resulting in a deeply uninteresting film debut for young Mariska Hargitay. But their mannerisms in large part are so outré and alienating, it's at times like watching an underfinanced dinner-theatre preview of 1986's Blue Velvet. And then the dead warlock bursts out of the ground to be attended by a clutch of grody puppets.

Nomads (1986) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Lesley-Anne Down, Pierce Brosnan, Anna-Maria Monticelli, Adam Ant
written and directed by John McTiernan

by Bryant Frazer Director John McTiernan's film debut is a true '80s oddity. Pierce Brosnan sports an ersatz French accent in his first big movie role. He's billed opposite Lesley-Anne Down, riding the downhill slope of her post-Sphinx career, but the two have only one scene together. McTiernan's script, to date his only screenwriting credit, is some superficial fluffernutter about restless inuat (spirits of Inuit mythology) haunting the L.A. living--except when it's a diffuse meditation on the stateless qualities of Angelenos and California in general. Even the score, an improvisational guitar-and-synth freakout by Bill Conti and (I shit you not) Ted Nugent, is genuinely weird.

Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988) [Collector's Edition] + Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (1989) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray + DVD Combo Packs

SLEEPAWAY CAMP II: UNHAPPY CAMPERS
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
starring Pamela Springsteen, Renée Estevez, Brian Patrick Clarke, Walter Gotell
written by Fritz Gordon
directed by Michael A. Simpson

SLEEPAWAY CAMP III: TEENAGE WASTELAND
½*/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
starring Pamela Springsteen, Tracy Griffith, Michael J. Pollard
written by Fritz Gordon
directed by Michael A. Simpson

by Bryant Frazer Say what you will about the original Sleepaway Camp--you can't accuse it of lacking ambition. All writer-director Robert Hiltzik had to do to sell a movie with that title in that era was cast a bunch of teenagers in a wan Friday the 13^th knock-off and splash some Karo blood around in the woods. Yet he made something dark and unique, with queer undertones: the first gender-identity horror film. The story goes that Hiltzik's script for a follow-up was rejected by producer Jerry Silva, who thought it was too dark. Instead, he forged ahead with plans to shoot two overtly-comic sequels back-to-back in Georgia under the direction of local talent Michael A. Simpson. A 24-year-old writer named Fritz Gordon got the gig on a recommendation from U.S. distributor Nelson Entertainment.

Miami Blues (1990) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Fred Ward, Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nora Dunn
screenplay by George Armitage, based on the novel by Charles Willeford
directed by George Armitage

by Jefferson Robbins Remember when handheld camera was a technique deployed to signal disorientation, estrangement, and vulnerability and not simply "the way we shoot movies now"? In George Armitage's Miami Blues, the otherwise-steady camera first comes unhinged when ex-con Frederick "Junior" Frenger Jr. (Alec Baldwin) orders newly-requisitioned hooker Pepper (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to roll over on her belly, presumably so he can employ her the way male prisoners employ each other sexually. He can't, though, because there's something different there, and an afternoon's purchased pleasure becomes an affair. Armitage's use of the camera is a punctuation, a chapter break in Junior's story, reassuring us that while Junior is malevolent and unpredictable, Pepper won't immediately meet the same fate as the Hare Krishna that Junior (kind of accidentally) murdered an hour before. Still, you should probably worry for her.

New Year's Evil (1980) - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Roz Kelly, Kip Niven, Chris Wallace, Grant Cramer
screenplay by Leonard Neubauer
directed by Emmett Alston

by Bryant Frazer Every 1980s slasher movie needed a gimmick, and New Year's Evil has two: a Halloween-inspired holiday tie-in and a youth-culture exploitation angle. A Hollywood-based serial killer promises to murder a victim at the stroke of midnight in each of the four continental U.S. time zones, announcing his intentions by calling "Hollywood Hotline", a New Year's Eve countdown TV show hosted by Roz Kelly (the erstwhile Pinky Tuscadero on "Happy Days") that features live performances by punkish new wave acts. The results are surprisingly watchable. The psycho-killer story is actually a bit twisty as these things go, with a mid-film reversal of fortune aiming to give audiences a rooting interest in the villain. And though the bands on screen (Shadow and Made in Japan) seem to be employed mainly to help pad out the film's 86-minute running time, their proto-Guns N' Roses sounds are not entirely disagreeable.

Brazilian Western (2013) - Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

Faroeste caboclo
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Felipe Abib, Antonio Calloni, César Troncoso, Marcos Paulo
screenplay by Marcos Bernstein and Victor Atherino
directed by René Sampaio

by Jefferson Robbins If a few things fall too neatly into place in René Sampaio's Brazilian Western--like beautiful Maria Lúcia (Isis Valverde) jumping into bed with fugitive João (Fabrício Boliveira), who just held her at gunpoint in her own bedroom--well, it's a fable. That's meant literally, since the film is adapted from a megahit ballad of roughly the same name: Legāio Urbana's nine-minute barn-burner of calamity, bloodshed, love, and redemption spoke to something in the Brazilian psyche in 1987, charting João de Santo Christo's fatal misadventures with the corrupt forces that kept a boot on the underclass. Sampaio's adaptation has a lot to live up to in that respect, as well as in honouring the western genre to which the title nods. It winds up a Leone-ian Scarface of sorts, although the stakes are different--pot instead of coke, infatuation rather than the will to power, with imbalances of class and race at the forefront.

Mad Max (1979) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Mel Gibson, Joanne Samuel, Steve Bisley, Hugh Keays-Byrne
written by James McCausland and George Miller
directed by George Miller

by Walter Chaw George Miller's films are warnings against dehumanization, against valuing machineries over intuition and emotions. It's what drives the Holocaust parable at the heart of his masterpiece, Babe: Pig in the City; what made him the perfect match for Twilight Zone: The Movie's remake of "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet." Though terms like "visionary" and "auteur" are as overused as they are misused, Miller is both. He's a rarity in the modern conversation: an aging director who shows no signs of a slackening energy or diminished focus. See also in Miller's work an unusual sensitivity to physical deformity set up against a righteous offense at spiritual blight. (He began his career as a trauma physician.) His films seek to do no harm, but sometimes you need to cut out some healthy tissue to get at the disease. All of it--the work as a doctor, the scrappiness, the impulsiveness that led to his strapping an airplane jet on a car and hoping no one would die (no one did)--is part of a creation mythology for Miller that's as fulsome as Herzog's. Testament to Miller's enduring influence and outsider status: he's a sainted figure, for good reason.

Herzog: The Collection [Blu-ray Disc] - Stroszek

****/****
DVD - Image A Sound A Commentary A
BD - Image B Sound A- Commentary A
starring Bruno S., Eva Mattes, Clemens Scheitz, Wilhelm von Homburg
written and directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw I love this film. I'm enthralled by it. And every time I revisit it, it has a new gift for me. Bruno S. plays the titular Stroszek, a street performer released from a two-year institutionalization and left to his own devices with hooker girlfriend Eva (Eva Mattes) and pal Mr. Scheitz (Clemens Scheitz). There's a transparency to the performances that transcends naturalism: you sense that the actors are not only playing themselves (more so than usual), but also that they're playing themselves as allegorical figures in a metaphor for their lives. It's Spider, but it's at once more and less expressionistic than David Cronenberg's film--and while the long, quiet, empty reaches of living in the giant abandoned warehouse of a mind in flux is a constant melancholy the two films share, there is something in Stroszek, crystallized in the haunting image of a premature baby pawing at its bedding, that does more to traumatize the human condition. When the film's heroic triumvirate flee Germany for the gilded shores of Wisconsin ("Everybody's rich there"), in a migration that reminds a little of Aguirre's doomed hunt for El Dorado, Stroszek is suddenly a picture about pilgrimage to a holy land that exists solely in the windy spaces conjured by the promise of westward expansion.

Vampire's Kiss (1989)/High Spirits (1988) [Double Feature] - Blu-ray Disc

VAMPIRE'S KISS
***½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Nicolas Cage, Maria Conchita Alonso, Jennifer Beals, Elizabeth Ashley
screenplay by Joseph Minion
directed by Robert Bierman

HIGH SPIRITS
**/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Daryl Hannah, Peter O'Toole, Steve Guttenberg, Beverly D'Angelo
written and directed by Neil Jordan

by Walter Chaw Delightfully, extravagantly bizarre, Robert Bierman's Vampire's Kiss houses arguably Nicolas Cage's most peculiar performance in the service of a piece the contemporary in every way of Oliver Stone's Wall Street and the precursor, in every way, to Mary Harron's American Psycho. It excoriates the boy's club of the executive boardroom, treats sexual harassment and assault like real things with real consequences, and has something to say on the subjects of race and the economic caste. It's a canny satire of the vampire genre even as it's an honourable addition to it, exploring those metaphorical elements that transformed vampirism in the '80s into the equivalent of being the "cool kid" (The Lost Boys), the rock star (The Hunger), and the eternally demon lover (Fright Night). Working from a script by Joseph Minion, who not only wrote Martin Scorsese's brilliant (and in some ways similar) After Hours but also the Scorsese-helmed episode of "Amazing Stories" called "Mirror, Mirror" (itself an antecedent to David Robert Mitchell's It Follows), Bierman proves himself an able navigator of Minion's liminal cartography. Vampire's Kiss is about the spaces between and the things that fall in there.

Escape from New York (1981) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc|Escape from New York [Special Edition - DVD Collector's Set] - DVD

John Carpenter's Escape from New York
***½/****
DVD - Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
BD - Image B+ Sound A Extras A
starring Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasence
screenplay by John Carpenter & Nick Castle
directed by John Carpenter

The below was written a dozen years ago, definitely in a crunch (I remember being among the first to receive a review copy of that DVD and wanting to scoop other sites) and, consequently, probably in a crabby mood. New reviews of John Carpenter movies, particularly the early ones, tend to read like fetishism as opposed to criticism. Indeed, over the years, Carpenter's aesthetics have become a shorthand for cool, such that some modern horror filmmakers seem to believe that by co-opting them they'll gain instant credibility. Still, I think I resisted the pleasures of Escape from New York a little too vehemently--this must be the most negative 3.5-star review I've ever written. Yes, that rape scene, or would-be rape scene, is troublesome, but for Snake to intervene would've been even more offensive, because it would mean the situation was cynically contrived to give him a moment of glory. Snake's heroism isn't pandering, and while his laconic machismo fits a certain Eastwood mold, he finally emerges as more of a countercultural badass who uses his carte blanche audience with the President to ask him the kind of impertinent rhetorical question one wants to say to every bureaucrat valued more than the soldiers doing his bidding: "We did get you out. A lot of people died in the process. I just wondered how you felt about it." The President's ineffectual condolences, phrased as boilerplate and expressed with squirm-inducing hesitation as he mentally scans for a lifeline (then and there, Donald Pleasence exonerates his miscasting), justify Snake's final act in a way that makes me regret ascribing the "moral evasion" of The Thing--say what?--to this picture as well. Carpenter isn't ducking anything here: Snake sees that this world is rotten from the head down and so he lights the proverbial fuse. God bless him, he's an asshole. (But not a dick.)

Blacula (1972)/Scream Blacula Scream (1973) [Double Feature] - Blu-ray Disc

BLACULA
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring William Marshall, Denise Nicholas, Vonetta McGee, Charles Macaulay
screenplay by Joan Torres and Raymond Koenig
directed by William Crain

SCREAM BLACULA SCREAM
*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras D
starring William Marshall, Don Mitchell, Pam Grier, Richard Lawson
screenplay by Joan Torres & Raymond Koenig and Maurice Jules
directed by Bob Kelljan

by Bryant Frazer It takes some nerve to turn an exploitative, possibly racist script treatment from a low-budget movie-manufacturing plant like Samuel Z. Arkoff's American Independent Pictures (AIP) into a tragic meditation on the legacy of slavery in contemporary urban society, but that's what director William Crain and actor William Marshall damn near pulled off with Blacula. Originally conceived as a blaxploitation programmer with the ersatz jive-talking title Count Brown Is in Town, the project that would become Blacula took on some gravity when Crain cast Marshall, a trained Shakespearean actor, in the title role. Marshall insisted on alterations to the script that gave the film a subtext: he would play the lead as an 18^th-century African noble who, while touring Europe in an attempt to persuade the aristocracy to oppose the slave trade, was turned into a vampire and imprisoned for more than 100 years by the rabidly racist Count Dracula. In Marshall's imagining of the story, it was Dracula who, seeking to demean the uppity foreigner, saddled him with the dismissive, derivative moniker Blacula.

Dolls (1987) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

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***/**** Image B+ Sound B- Extras B-
starring Stephen Lee, Guy Rolfe, Hilary Mason, Carrie Lorraine
screenplay by Ed Naha
directed by Stuart Gordon

by Bryant Frazer A cross between "Hansel and Gretel" and The Old Dark House, Dolls is director Stuart Gordon's idea of a family-friendly horror movie. That is, it puts a little girl in peril from square one and admires her serenity and good-heartedness in the face of danger all around. The dark house belongs to the Hartwickes, an adorable elderly couple with an extensive collection of murderously ambulatory dolls. The little girl is 7-year-old Judy Bower (Carrie Lorraine), and the peril comes not from the old folks or their killer figurines but from her lousy parents--a loveless father and stepmother who have brought her on vacation only because joint custody keeps the child-support payments low. Joining the unhappy family at Hartwicke Manor on a dark and stormy night are fellow travellers-in-refuge Ralph (Stephen Lee), an earnest but overgrown man-child, and Isabel (Bunty Bailey, best-known from A-Ha's "Take on Me" music video) and Enid (Cassie Stuart), the shifty rocker-girl hitchhikers he picked up. Naturally, the guests start to disappear one by one. Who will be left at the end of the night?

Motel Hell (1980) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

click any image to enlarge

**/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Rory Calhoun, Paul Linke, Nancy Parsons, Wolfman Jack
screenplay by Robert Jaffe and Steven-Charles Jaffe
directed by Kevin Connor

by Bryant Frazer SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. If you give Motel Hell credit for anything, score it full marks for its infamous abattoir-set climax, in which an overalls-clad farmer wearing a grotesque pig mask and wielding a chainsaw battles the local sheriff--also wielding a chainsaw--over the body of a damsel in distress bound to a conveyer belt feeding an industrial meat slicer. Motel Hell wasn't particularly original, even in the annals of American B-movies of the era, and it's not especially scary or creepy--director Kevin Connor doesn't have much of a taste for horror. But he was certainly able to recognize a spectacle. During a long career, Connor directed Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Mickey Rooney in a fantasy called Arabian Adventure, shot on location in Japan another horror film starring Susan George, and even helmed a TV biopic of Elizabeth Taylor starring Sherilyn Fenn. It's the signature image of Farmer Vincent wearing a hog's head and brandishing a power saw, though, that has followed him through the decades.

Phantom of the Paradise (1974) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

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***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Paul Williams, William Finley, Jessica Harper, Gerrit Graham
written and directed by Brian De Palma

by Bryant Frazer When did Brian De Palma become Brian De Palma? Some of the director's pet themes were already taking shape in his earliest films, and--following his abortive, disowned studio debut, Get to Know Your Rabbit--Sisters proved he could make something out of a lurid, over-the-top indie thriller. But only Phantom of the Paradise suggested the real scale of his outré ambition. Mixing slasher-movie tropes into a supernatural romantic fantasy with elements of rock opera, in collaboration with an actual star singer-songwriter? In 1974, apparently Brian De Palma believed he could do anything.

Without Warning (1980) - Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

click any image to enlarge

***/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Jack Palance, Martin Landau, Tarah Nutter, Christopher S. Nelson
written by Lyn Freeman, Daniel Grodnik, Ben Nett, Steve Mathis
directed by Greydon Clark

by Bill Chambers A slasher movie in spirit, Greydon Clark's Without Warning sure opens like one, in that some cannon fodder is swiftly dispatched to establish the bogeyman and the threat he represents. But instead of the typical frisky coeds or vacationing couple, the first victims are a father (Cameron Mitchell) and his adult son (Darby Hinton) on a hunting trip, and their dialogue is freighted with an impressive amount of history and subtext. The son is rudely awakened at the crack of dawn by his angry father; he proceeds to criticize the taste of the local water, which the father stubbornly hears as girlish griping rather than the anvil it actually is. Though they're archetypal opposites (the Great Santini and his sensitive offspring), the son does try to call a truce of sorts and is soundly, sadly rebuffed. The father's macho anti-intellectualism--the boy brought books on a hunting trip!--makes theirs an unbridgeable generation gap, and there's an unsettling moment where he trains his rifle on his son, sniper-style, before thinking the better of it. Then suddenly the father is attacked by flesh-eating disks that burrow into his skin, and what can he do except cry out for his kid, who soon suffers the same tragic fate.

Herzog: The Collection [Blu-ray Disc] - Heart of Glass (1976)

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Herz aus Glas
***½/****
DVD - Image A Sound B Commentary B
BD - Image A- Sound A- Commentary B
starring Josef Bierbichler, Stefan Güttler, Clemens Scheitz, Volker Prechtel
written and directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw Hias (Josef Bierbichler) is a shepherd and a prophet, and his pronouncements pepper Heart of Glass like edicts from God. He defines the structure, in so much as there is one, of a picture that drifts in tone between Werner Herzog's nightmarish, nostalgic Bavarian romanticism and a certain variety of gothic surrealism. Indeed, Heart of Glass, while hewing close to Herzog's themes of the insufficiency of myth as a means to obscure truths about horror and beauty as well as of the artist as solitary, Byronic voyager, appears to be Herzog's play at the stylization of Buñuel. After an aged glassblower dies in a small village, the out-of-time surviving villagers, reliant on the "ruby glass" that was the artisan's specialty, spend the balance of the piece spiralling in a maddening gyre to divine the secret of the formula. Like Aguirre: The Wrath of God, the story behind the scenes--that Herzog hypnotized his cast daily to create a trancelike (glassy-eyed, if you will) mien--has become almost better-known than the details of the film itself. 

Herzog: The Collection [Blu-ray Disc] - My Best Fiend (1999)

Mein liebster Feind - Klaus Kinski
**/****
DVD - Image B+ Sound B+
BD - Image B+ Sound B+
directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw My Best Fiend is Werner Herzog trying to dispel some of the myths surrounding his career by magnifying a few of the myths surrounding Klaus Kinski's. As such, it feels a lot more like a cheap shot than like a tribute, burying as it does Kinski's indisputable genius beneath a lot of documentary evidence that Kinski was a slavering lunatic. And though Herzog betrays a definite affection for Kinski (nowhere more so than in a hilarious/warm reminiscence offered to the very proper German couple living in the apartment once shared by the director and actor), more often the piece is given to obfuscating outtakes and anecdotes. Consider the eclipsing impact that B-roll footage of a raving Kinski on the set of Aguirre, The Wrath of God and Herzog's comments about the natives offering to kill the actor for him have on Kinski's astonishingly reserved, haunted performance in the film. If you've never seen Aguirre, you'd think that Kinski was awful in it--and if you have seen Aguirre, your mind begins to blur what's actually on the screen. It's subtle, but it starts to resemble a snowjob akin to the belief, held by most (even those who've seen the films), that Halloween and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre are splatter flicks, when in fact there's more blood in Psycho than in those two films combined.

Herzog: The Collection [Blu-ray Disc] - Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972)

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Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes
****/****
DVD - Image A Sound B+ Commentary A
BD - Image A- Sound B+ Commentaries A
starring Klaus Kinski, Helena Rojo, Del Negro, Ruy Guerra
written and directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw A work of holy madness about acts of holy madness, Aguirre, The Wrath of God is a transcendent, haunting film that defies description and captures, somehow, what it means to be human in all the venal, small, sometimes grand things that being human implies. Once seen, it's never forgotten, and upon repeat viewings, it's one of those pictures that makes you want to cry for no particular reason but that it is, in almost every non-quantifiable way, perfect, a film alight with invention, love, and passion--a memoir of the worm in the gut that demands blood and glory. Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) is an under-lieutenant in the bona fide Peruvian expedition of Gonzalo Pizarro (Alejandro Repullés) to find the lost city of gold, El Dorado, a fiction of the Peruvian Indians meant as a suicide pill for their conquistadors. Once the expedition bogs down in the mud of the rainy season, Pizarro sends nobleman Don Pedro de Ursua (Ruy Guerra) off with Aguirre on a satellite mission to scout a path ahead for the main body. Though neither party was ever heard from again, Aguirre, The Wrath of God proposes to tell the final days of Ursua's doomed men.

The Final Terror (1983) - Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

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*/**** Image B+ Sound B- Extras B+
starring John Friedrich, Rachel Ward, Adrian Zmed, Mark Metcalf
screenplay by Jon George & Neill Hicks and Ronald Shusett
directed by Andrew Davis

by Bryant Frazer Of all the lousy, Z-list horror films that flooded American multiplexes in the wake of the success of Friday the 13^th, The Final Terror may have the most incongruously A-list IMDb profile page, which explains its failure to languish in well-deserved obscurity. It is exemplary of the 1980s horror boom as opportunistic folly--horror movies were being made by people who had no interest in making horror movies, simply because that's where the easy money was. Horror buffs know this, but still, how can any self-respecting 21^st-century genre cultist resist the siren call of a little-known slasher starring Rachel Ward, Daryl Hannah, Mark Metcalf, Adrian Zmed, and Joe Pantoliano and directed by Andrew Davis?

Deadly Eyes (1982) - Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

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Night Eyes
**/**** Image B+ Sound B- Extras B+
starring Sam Groom, Sara Botsford, Lisa Langlois, Scatman Crothers
screenplay by Charles Eglee, based on a screenplay by Lonon Smith and the novel The Rats by James Herbert
directed by Robert Clouse

by Bryant Frazer There's really only one thing you need to know about Deadly Eyes, and I'm going to tell you right here in the lede. Deadly Eyes is a film in which hordes of giant killer rats terrorizing downtown Toronto are played by dachshunds wearing rat costumes. That's it. A monster movie is only as good as its monster, and this monster is wiener dogs in drag. If you don't find that off-putting--perhaps you raised your eyebrows, gasped in delight, and leaned in a little closer to your computer screen upon reading those words--then it's quite possible Deadly Eyes is the terrible horror movie you've been waiting for.

Herzog: The Collection [Blu-ray Disc] - Even Dwarfs Started Small (1971)

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Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen
***½/****
DVD - Image A Sound B+ Commentary A
BD - Image A- Sound B+ Commentary A
starring Helmut Döring, Gerd Gickel, Paul Glauer, Erna Gschwendtner
written and directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw Even Dwarfs Started Small opens with a disquieting montage featuring a young girl rending live birds with her teeth that also culminates in the image of a chicken eating another chicken (shades of Magritte's 1927 painting "Pleasure"). Both actions speak to a sort of insensate savagery, the divorce between the Freudian Id and Ego so favoured by the surrealists--and in setting the film in a fictitious place populated entirely by the little people of the title, it touches on the surrealist belief that non-Western civilizations were closer to an undifferentiated nature. The story proper concerns the uprising of a "Prisoner"-like colony against an ineffectual, Kafkaesque godhead (Pepi Hermine) and the Institution he represents. Rebelling against the imprisonment of leader Pepe (Gerd Gickel, tied to a chair throughout), the rebels devolve from a semi-organized protest into bedlam, crucifying monkeys, organizing cockfights, and, in one of the most hopeless conclusions in film, watching as rebel leader Hombre (Helmut Döring) laughs until he chokes at the sight of a defecating camel.

Final Exam (1981) - Blu-ray Disc

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*½**** Image B- Sound B- Extras C
starring Cecile Bagdadi, Joel Rice, Ralph Brown, DeAnna Robbins
written and directed by Jimmy Huston

by Bryant Frazer Beware the toothless horror film--it's no fun being gummed to death. That's how you feel, more or less, by the climax of Final Exam, a low-budget Halloween knock-off crossed with a dopey frat-boy comedy. Written and directed by Jimmy Huston, who had made a series of southern-fried features for the drive-in circuit with North Carolina-based actor-producer Earl Owensby, Final Exam is a vintage programmer about a handful of students on a mostly-deserted college campus and a serial killer slicing his way through them, essentially at random.

Sleepaway Camp (1983) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

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**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Mike Kellin, Katherine Kamhi, Paul DeAngelo, Jonathan Tiersten
written and directed by Robert Hiltzik

by Bryant Frazer Ah, summer camp. Softball games, capture the flag, nightswimming, and life-changing boating accidents. Not to mention killer bees, child molesters, maniacs in the shower, and one kid with a whole lot of baggage, if you know what I mean. Sleepaway Camp is a slasher movie, and it depicts lakeside Camp Arawak as a pressure-cooker of hormones and teenage flop sweat. Into this fetid milieu step Ricky and Angela, teenaged cousins united by tragedy: a boating accident that killed Angela's parents and sibling some years earlier. Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten) might be a little awkward, but he just wants to fit in; Angela (Felissa Rose), meanwhile, seems downright disturbed, spending much of her time dead silent, staring down her fellow campers with a mournful, almost accusatory glare. Before long, some of those campers start dropping dead as surely as the flies that coat the glue strips dangling in Arawak's kitchen. There's a soup incident, a shower incident, and an incident involving a toilet stall and angry bees. There's a bit of business with a curling iron that's probably inappropriate in a movie starring underage actors. The slasher's hands appear on screen, but do they belong to unhappy Angela? Overprotective Ricky? Or someone else entirely?

Evilspeak (1982) - Blu-ray Disc

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**/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Clint Howard, R.G. Armstrong, Joseph Cortese, Claude Earl Jones
screenplay by Joseph Garofalo and Eric Weston
directed by Eric Weston

by Bryant Frazer Consider the pig. Pork is damned near a gourmet food these days. Celebrity chefs will serve you layers of pork belly wrapped around potatoes, figs, even pineapple. They'll dip bacon in chocolate, infuse it in vodka, or drape it across an ice-cream sundae, resplendent in its brown glory. Your local organic market probably sells artisanal bacon cured with dark, fine-grained muscovado imported from Mauritius and flavoured with angel farts and faerie dust. The recent cinema has also celebrated the pig, via two excellent Babe movies and a decent adaptation of Charlotte's Web. It wasn't always that way, though. No less an authority than God Himself went Old Testament on pork back in the day, and it took the famous and completely disingenuous "Pork: The Other White Meat" campaign to rehabilitate swine for the U.S. market. What I mean to say is that the 1982 horror movie Evilspeak, in which a trio of crazed, Satan-possessed porkers burst into a bathroom and disembowel a nude woman taking a shower, couldn't have done the humble pig's reputation any favours.