by David Cornelius
When you ask for suggestions on, say, overlooked summer movies or overlooked school movies, you get a tiny handful of responses, enough to compliment your own picks and round out a decently sized column. When you ask for suggestions on overlooked horror, however, you find yourself lost in a sea of titles.
This is what happened to me as I prepared this very Halloween themed Forgotten Video column. Everyone, it turns out, has a few ideas of what makes an overlooked horror film, and everyone has a few hidden gems they can’t wait to share with you. I quickly realized that to cover them all - in addition to the too many I had thought up myself - would take a good year, at least. The only viable solution: whittle the list down at complete random, ignore any sense of group logic (that is, don’t try to go for a “overlooked vampire movies from 1984 through 1987” thing), and apologize to those who offered tips but do not get to see their suggestions listed below.
So here we go. An extra sloppy, makes-no-sense Halloween edition of Forgotten Video, the result of me quickly grabbing eight titles that showed the potential for holiday chills and thrills. Enjoy.
Let’s kick things off with “The Monster Club” (1980), from producer Milton Subotsky. Subostky’s name might not be familiar, but the studio he co-founded in the early 1960s is: Amicus Productions, the British house of horror that became a runner-up of sorts to Hammer Studios. Amicus is best remembered today for its series of popular anthology films, including “Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors” (1964), “Aslyum” (1972), “Vault of Horror” (1973), etc. The studio went south in 1978, and Subotsky, looking to recreate some of that old black magic, began work on “Monster Club,” which would be a horror anthology in the old school Amicus vein - only this time, there’d be laughs and music.
The selling point here is the casting of Vincent Price and John Carradine, two icons of the genre. They appear in the “wrap-around” portions of the film, in which a sneaky vampire (Price) invites horror author Ronald Chetwynd-Hynes (Carradine) to the Monster Club, a night club where werewolves and zombies rock all night to the sounds of new wave bands on stage. UB40’s the only name in the credits that went anywhere (although I must’ve been so glazed over by the rest of the movie - I don’t remember seeing them here); the rest of the songs come from bands like The Pretty Things, Night, and The Viewers. If you’ve never heard them before, that will be corrected here, as the film allows each band to play their songs in their entirety. Considering that none of these songs are actually any good, and that the performances are presented in ultra-cheap music video-on-stage format, the whole thing starts to feel like one night in eternity.
I should probably mention that the monsters dancing it up are all way beyond camp, everyone looking like they’ve just won fifth place in a costume contest. Store-bought ghoul masks, that sort of thing. The fakeness is supposed to be part of the film’s charm; it is actually only part of its embarrassment.
Chetwynd-Hynes, by the way, is an actual British writer; it’s his stories upon which the film is based. Which means the three tales featured here are mercifully more enjoyable and less clumsy than the strain-for-a-laugh wrap-around segments. The first story tells of a vampire-werewolf offspring who, because of his ugliness, is also a hermit; he falls in love, but does she love him back, or is she only after his riches? The second tale finds a young boy discovering his father is a vampire, and a hunted one at that. The final story features a film crew coming to a mysterious village eager to shoot a horror picture, unaware that the residents have something more sinister in mind.
The first story is quite solid, complete with thick atmosphere and a genuinely scary finale. The other two, however, are rather tedious, with moments of intrigue spread out over too much boredom. These will thrill only those desperate for more Amicus-style short gothic horror. And even so, you’d still have to sit through the pain that is the Price/Carradine scenes, which, despite the best efforts of the two stars, are cringe-inducing, thanks to some awful jokes (a film producer turns out to be a vampire, to which Price quips, “Aren’t they all?”) and some truly dreadful (and very dated) music. In the liner notes, Price is quoted as calling this new kind of slapdash film experience a “movie disco.” If two words ever convinced you to stay far away from something, it’d have to be “movie disco,” yes?
More successful in combining thrills and laughter is Larry Cohen’s “The Stuff” (1985), a semi-update of “The Blob” (1958) (or, at least, “X the Unknown” [1956]) mixed with “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956) (or, at least, “It Came From Outer Space” [1953]) that’s more interested in Cohen’s trademark quirkiness than in any kind of logic or reason. In fact, Cohen, who wrote and directed, looks like all he wants to do is to take a snaky poke at a consumer society, and if we can get a few monster moments out of that, then good for us.
The film’s opening scenes jump so quickly that Cohen barely seems interested in the exposition, jumping us from key point to key point as fast as possible, not bothering to connect the dots smoothly, trying to get us to the thrust of the story right away. And so we watch briefly as some dumb hick finds some weird white goo seeping up from out of the ground; as dumb hicks are wont to do, he just bends over and starts eating. (Hey, why not, it looks like Cool Whip, so how bad can it be?) Jump ahead: that goo is now “The Stuff,” an easy-to-eat snack that’s the rage of the nation. Thing is, it’s also alive.
Michael Moriarity appears as the former fed-turned-industrial spy who’s out to crack why the Stuff is so darn popular - the movie works mostly because Moriarity seems to understand exactly what kind of movie he’s making, namely, a dumbass horror comedy whose sly winks inform us that it might not be as dumbass as it first appears. Cohen’s best works have always been gems whose low budgets hide dangerous smarts, and here, we get a biting satire of an America that’s desperate to get the Hot New Thing, a desperation that leads to the kind of bland conformity seen in the faces of the Stuff’s victims, emotionless zombies who just want to eat more Stuff.
But, of course, Cohen doesn’t want to get all serious and snooty on you, and so he brings in Garrett Morris to play Chocolate Chip Charlie, who’s gone out of business thanks to the Stuff; Paul Sorvino as the wingnut head of a right-wing militia ready to kick some Stuff ass; and Danny Aiello as a greasy FDA guy. All provide plenty of grins.
Oh, and then there’s the special effects, which are pretty nifty for a movie of this size. Like Romero, Cohen’s eager to hide his commentary under an onslaught of grotesque imagery. The result is a catchy, clever little film that revels in its low budget goodness. As they say in the film, enough is never enough of the Stuff.
On to more comedy, if only of the attempted variety, courtesy of the Hudson Brothers. “Hysterical” (1983) was a horror spoof aimed to capitalize on the Hudsons’ success… of eight years earlier. (Great timing, boys.) To those of you for whom the words “Hudson Brothers” are not enough of a warning, let me add then that as far as horror-comedies go, “Hysterical” is slightly less horrible than “Saturday the 14th” (1981) but worse than, say, “Transylvania 6-5000” (1985). Yeah, it’s that kind of bad.
“Hysterical” (get it? The word means to go crazy out of fear, but it also means hilarious! Just like this movie! Hilarious! Get it?!) is mostly about the town of Cape Hellview, Oregon (“population: strange,” har har), which has a haunted lighthouse into which struggling writer Frederic (Bill Hudson) moves in the hopes of writing the Great American Novel. The ghost of Julie Newmar (!) pops up, gets jealous or something, and resurrects the zombie/ghost/whatever of Captain Howdy (Richard Kiel!!). Nutcase coroner-with-a-“funny”-lisp Bud Cort (!!!) is unable to help, and so a pair of bumbling adventurers (Mark and Brett Hudson) are called in to save the day.
It’s at this point that I would normally tell of how wackiness ensues. But oh, how desolate that ensuing wackiness is. Cornball references to “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “The Exorcist,” “Taxi Driver,” “The Shining,” “Poltergeist,” and “Jaws.” Sight gags in which guys get hit in the nuts. A joke that has Tom Snyder as the punchline. Two song-and-dance numbers. Cartoon sound effects on the soundtrack. And Charlie Callas as Dracula.
The film was written - badly - by the Hudsons and directed - badly - by Chris Bearde. Bearde made this his lone directorial experience, a job he wedged in between producing the Saturday morning variety show “The Hudson Brothers Razzle Dazzle Hour” and the amateur lip-synch contest show “Puttin’ On the Hits.” And between that, the Charlie Callas thing, and the freaking Hudson Brothers, I’m not sure why anyone would want to still see this movie. No, not even for John Larroquette’s cameo as a pothead tour guide (“Maui Wowie, Bobby’s stoned!” Grumble.)
Scooting away from comedy (such as it is), we find ourselves on a space station in low orbit (told ya these would be random jumps), with writer/director Paul Donovan’s “Def-Con 4” (1985). Yet another in a seemingly endless line of 80s apocalypse flick, this one introduces us to the Nemesis Mission, an SDI-type defense program that finds three astronaut-soldiers monitoring the planet from up above. For reasons that (wisely) remain unknown, war breaks out, wiping out most of the U.S. And then, for a long time… nothing. The space cowboys sit quietly, wondering what to do next.
Their decision is made for them when they’re mysteriously forced to land somewhere in the Pacific northwest. But wait! Although they’ve jettisoned their cargo of nukes, programming them to blow in sixty hours, one got stuck, meaning they’ve got sixty hours to hightail it outta there.
This being an 80s apocalypse flick, the astronauts immediately stumble across the less desirable types - and I do mean immediately. In the film’s freakiest moment, one of the astronauts, trying to dig out of the caspule, quickly realizes that hey, somebody’s got his hand, and it looks like they must be hungry, crazy, or whatever else causes a post-nuke mutant to tear someone’s hand clean off as an appetizer.
It’s the last truly intense moment of the film (a good half hour is spent in this claustrophobic setting, with three lone characters tormented about their fate). Once we get outside, with the woods of Nova Scotia supposedly doubling for a nuclear wasteland, things start to dip. We’re saved for a while by the appearance of Maury Chaykin as a freaky survivalist with a nipple fetish (don’t ask) and someone locked in his cellar; Chaykin’s hypnotically off-key performance gives this segment an unsettling feel, perfect for what the movie wants.
But then we finally get to the meat of the plot, something about a prep school jerk who’s somehow managed to become supreme leader of a band of psychos. The surviving astronauts and the few tagalongs they’ve stumbled across during the film do their best to stop the prep school jerk and save the day, or escape to Mexico, or something, although you’ll probably have lost interest by now. Donovan’s early scenes make for great horror, but he simply can’t do action at all, and the whole thing, complete with rampant gunplay and plenty of ’splosions, self-destructs too early. Still, it’s worth hunting down, if only for the film’s first half. Just bring a book.
Speaking of Canada, on we go to “My Bloody Valentine” (1981), a Canadian stab (no pun intended) at the holiday-slasher genre. And as far as dopey “Friday the 13th” rip-offs go, this one’s actually pretty darn good. Or, at least, pretty darn fun, with plenty of solid chills and at a handful of genuine jump-from-your-seat moments. But above all, it gets points for having one of the best killers of the early 80s, a miner with a gas mask and a pick-axe. The gas mask alone is quite disturbing; the pick-axe only adds to the freakiness.
The story involves the mining town of Valentine Bluffs, where, twenty years ago, there was a Valentine’s dance and a cave-in, and the combination of the two created a psycho stalker named Harry Warden, who’s determined to kill anyone celebrating Valentine’s Day. (OK, when I say it, it sounds pretty damn stupid. When the creepy old bartender in the film says it, however, it has an urban legend feel to it that makes it actually work. Go figure.) Now, after two decades without a dance and Harry Warden safely locked away in a loony bin miles away, the town decides to return to its old holiday traditions and hold a dance.
Bad move. Soon, severed hearts are showing up around town, with little notes attached to them, like the one that reads: “Roses are red, violets are blue. One is dead, and SO ARE YOU!!!” And then sweet little old ladies are getting hacked up and shoved into clothes dryers. Yeesh. Needless to say, the dance is cancelled. But then a bunch of party-hungry kids go ahead and throw their own, one that includes a trip down into the mines. Oh, slasher movie characters, will you never learn?
Where the film goes right is in its decision to work more with actual suspense instead of just inventive deaths - a major change from the era, which found too many of its horror movies being nothing but a showcase for random impalements courtesy the makeup department. Yes, the film operates with the Dead Teenager formula, rarely, if ever, venturing from the genre’s rulebook, but considering how many horror movies of the time lacked any sense of underlying fear, “Valentine” is refreshingly smart take. There is a whole lot of plot filler that’s not worth much - some love triangle nonsense that’s hardly memorable - but once you get that out of the way, you’re in for some good pick-axin’ times, Canuck style.
Another surprisingly smart holiday-slasher is “April Fool’s Day” (1986), a film that, despite a not-all-that-bad box office run, is remembered these days for its clever poster (a woman’s French braid in the shape of a noose) and very little else. But then, first glances would indicate a cheap screamfest swimming in dumb, eager to be forgotten. The main character’s name is Buffy St. John, for cryin’ out loud. Surely they couldn’t be serious?
Turns out they weren’t. The whole movie winks at us in between each murder, and the whole cast of characters - a parade of horror clichés - have been created fairly cleverly with tongue in cheek. Better still, the movie’s playful tone, based upon pranks pulled due to the titular holiday, invites a “gotcha” nature that actually suckers us into watching for more. Without them, this becomes just a series of Bad Things, your typical slasher fare; with them, we’re left always looking for the seams, and in a good way. The result is a slasher flick far more involving (and intelligent) than you’d ever expect.
As for the plot, consider this Agatha Christie Goes 80s. Buffy (Deborah Foreman, she of “Valley Girl” and “Real Genius” fame) invites a handful of her college friends to her sprawling lakefront estate for a weekend of April’s Fools shenanigans. (Oh, dribble glasses, will you never go out of style?) Anyway, wouldn’t you know it, somebody’s busy bumping off those kooky college kids one by one. And that’s all you need to know, really.
The whole thing’s so darn mischievous that even though it’s not as frightening as one would hope, it does wind up being a lot more entertaining than expected. Like “My Bloody Valentine,” “April Fool’s Day” is one of the smarter slasher flicks of its time. And if nothing else, you get to see Thomas “Biff Tannen” Wilson in action again, and that’s always a plus.
Moving on, more randomness. Let’s jump across the Pacific, into the world of Japanese horror. It’s the big trend these days, with some of the best frighteners around coming out of Asia, and with Hollywood desperate to remake every last one of ’em. But before the Asian horror boom of late, there was “Evil Dead Trap” (1988), a film mainly known only to the most hardcore of horror fans, who have turned it into their own cult classic.
The movie has all the hooks of later Asian horror. A late night TV host receives a videotape of what looks to be a pretty disturbing snuff film (as if there are any other kind of snuff films, but I digress). Figuring it’s the makings of a good show, she rounds up her crew and heads out to the abandoned factory where the video was apparently made. Considering that nobody thought of calling the cops, you gotta figure these knuckleheads are going to deserve what’s coming to them.
Yup, there’s a killer on the loose, and he’s eager to pick off the crew, and as violently as possible, too. Looks like this guy majored in impaling, with a minor in moping around in a hooded trenchcoat. Better still, he has a sometimes accomplice, some crazy-ass old guy who, in one of the film’s most disturbing scenes (and that’s saying something), rapes one victim while sneering, “It’s fun to kill! But it’s most fun to do it slowly!” Subtlety is not in this movie’s vocabulary.
Written by Takashi Ishii and directed by Toshiharu Ikeda, “Evil Dead Trap” is an odd mish-mash, with styles lifted from both the Italian gross-out horror (its on-screen violence from Fulci - watch out for those eyeball scenes! - and its too-repetitive musical score from Argento) and American slasher genres, not to mention a series of shots directly stolen from Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead.” And it’s all filtered through Japanese sensibilities. Which is all fine and good, really, as it’s disturbing enough without being overly so; if nothing else, the film never lets the viewer lose interest.
At least, that is, for its first half. In the second half, the filmmakers slowly introduce some ill-fitting supernatural weirdness, its attempts to explain the killer’s motives all too asinine (and, worse, all too drawn out and dull). This sets the stage, one could argue, for the tendency of modern Asian horror to fall apart in the final act, with random silliness thrown at us in all the wrong spots. The finale is a major letdown - it commits the ultimate horror movie sin: it gets boring - and so I will only recommend it to diehard Asian horror fans who somehow haven’t found it yet, or to serious gorehounds looking for explicit bloodshed.
Back to America, and a phone call from Robert Englund. Englund, who by the late 80s was permanently associated with his signature role, Freddy Krueger, made his directorial debut with “976-EVIL” (1989), a monster flick so unimpressive that Krueger would never direct again. (OK, so it’s a wee unfair to blame this movie’s badness on Krueger never returning to the director’s chair. But it’s as good a reason as any. If I were Englund, I’d run with it.)
The problem with the film is that it’s one of those horror movies where someone came up with a really neat title - in this case, one that spoofed the “900” toll phone companies that were all the rage at the time - and nobody cared what happened next. Turns out that not even having future Oscar winner Brian Helgeland (“L.A. Confidential” [1997], “Mystic River” [2003]) co-write your screenplay do any good. (For the record, the other writer was Rhet Topham, whose only other writing credit, according to the IMDB, is the heavy metal horror flop “Trick or Treat” [1986].)
The title refers to a 900 hotline where characters can call to get their “Horrorscope.” Get it? “Horrorscope?” Man, that’s almost as clever as naming your movie “Hysterical.” Ahem. The Horrorscope Hotline, or whatever they call it, is seemingly all in good fun, but it’s actually a phone service run by Beelzebub himself. Top that, Psychic Friends Network!
Stephen Geoffreys - this film fits on his resumé in between his getting nominated for a Tony in 1984 and his spending most of the 1990s as a gay porn star (favorite title: “Mechanics Bi Day, Lube Jobs Bi Night” [1995]) - plays Hoax, a nerdish type with an overbearing religious mother (think the mom from “Carrie” overplayed to the point of parody) and a greaser cousin (Patrick O’Bryan) who protects him at school. Soon enough, Hoax discovers 976-EVIL, and quickly becomes addicted to the service, makes a deal with the devil, and gets turned into a demon, eager to take revenge on all the punks who gave him swirlies after gym class.
The film is a painful mess, never scary, never smart, loaded with plot holes, terrible acting, and third-rate direction (sorry, Robert). It’s only worth watching for two solitary moments. The first is the shot of a Run-DMC poster on a projection booth wall; perhaps due to some copyright infringement fears, the rap group’s name is altered to read “Run-DMO.” Don’t know why, but it makes me giggle.
The second is a bit that allows the script to finally pay off for scene after scene of set-up involving the domineering mother, her plastic-covered couch, her refusal to let anyone sit on it (lest they dirty it), and a pet parrot who repeatedly squawks, “Not on the couch! Not on the couch!!” Demon Hoax, after killing off mama and splattering the vinyl covering with blood, then turns to the bird. “Not on the couch!” it cries as Hoax reaches in for the feathery kill. And here, after a full hour-plus of all this, is what we get: “That’s what the plastic’s for, asshole!”
Hmm. Yeah. OK, then.
“976-EVIL” is a movie chock full of Freddy-esque one-liners, but as you can see, none of them are more clever than having the main villain curse out a parrot. And yet, despite this, and despite the fact that nobody actually bothered to go see “976-EVIL” in theaters, someone still decided it’d be a good idea to make the direct-to-video “976-EVIL 2: The Astral Factor” (1991). My head hurts.
Oh, there were so many other films I wanted to discuss here, titles that are forced to wait for another day. I never got to kiddie fare, like the Disney gem “The Watcher In the Woods” (1980) or the made-for-TV Bradbury mini-masterpiece “The Halloween Tree” (1993). I never got to the series of still-unavailable-on-DVD titles, such as “Paperhouse” (1988), “Eyes of Fire” (1983), or “Jack’s Back” (1988), the latter being one of my all-time favorite overlooked films. New-to-DVD titles such as “The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane” (1976) and “Private Parts” (1972) will have to be put on hold here, as will “Pin” (1988), “Pumpkinhead” (1989), and “Sleepaway Camp” (1983) - just a tiny fraction of the titles that were recommended to me for this column.
It turns out that when it comes to overlooked horror, one column simply isn’t enough. Come to think of it, neither is ten…
“The Monster Club,” “The Stuff,” “Hysterical,” “Def-Con 4,” “My Bloody Valentine,” “April Fool’s Day,” “Evil Dead Trap,” and “976-EVIL” are all currently available on DVD.
link directly to this feature at http://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/feature.php?feature=1635
originally posted: 10/30/05 20:28:32
last updated: 12/09/05 05:41:24
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