February 2013's Footstones

Being a List of the Assorted Horrors I've Consumed During the Month of February, 2013

Though quite the understatement, it would be fair to say that I watch a few more horror films in any given month than I find the time to cover here on the blog. I began the blog almost a year ago with the intention of it being a screening diary, in which I hoped to more or less write about every horror film I watched. This was almost immediately stifling: not only was I forcing myself to write a developed entry about everything I happened to see (no matter how difficult or uninteresting that task may have been), but this dictum actually began to persuade me against watching as many horror films as I generally do, knowing that if I watched fifty or so horror movies in a month I'd feel that nagging compulsion in the back of my mind to write about them. The switch to monthly themes in the last half year or so of this blog's life has both given the blog a novel organizing principle and liberated me from the its initial mission.

Nevertheless, this decision has prevented a wealth of good (and execrable) films that I've been watching from being included here on the blog, so from here on out I'm going to split the difference by presenting a new monthly feature called Footstones. These Footstone entries will be the first of every month and will be a collection of brief-ish capsule commentaries on those odds and ends that I've watched but that didn't fit the previous month's theme. With any luck, these entries will soothe my writerly conscience and provide you, gentle reader, with some bite-sized thoughts for mastication.

For more capsule-shaped reading fun, make sure to check out my freshly published Favorite Film Discoveries of 2012 list over at Rupert Pupkin Speaks.

Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000) dir. John Ottman

Jamie Blanks's Urban Legend (1998), with its adoption of a clever but never cloying metanarrative, adherence to the bombastic and ludicrous tenor of slashers past, and utilization of Rebecca Gayheart's massive hair, rests unquestionably in the top tier of post-Scream slashers. John Ottman's follow-up can't claim the same heights. It's a decent entertainment, featuring likeable enough characters and some moderately cute (though ultimately underdeveloped) methods for connecting this followup to the first film. But its insane jumps in logic and storytelling (moves which felt organic in the first film) here seem overly calculated, as if they're missing the wit they think they possess (see: most of the jokes, the twin twist). Moreover, its film school setting is about as nauseating and false as such fictional depictions tend to be (see: resources as good as any Hollywood production and Joey Lawrence on his cellphone calling up his Tinseltown connects). It sounds like a snub to say that the best part of Final Cut is its closing credits, but if you've seen the film you'll understand: oh, what it could have been! Though I can't remember any compulsion to see it at the time (which is nearly unthinkable considering my affection for the first film), this sequel was not a direct-to-video release. It received a genuine theatrical run and even made a profit, though it only wound up taking in about half of the business that Blanks's film did. Indeed, a second sequel, Urban Legends: Bloody Mary (2005), which breaks away from the series' slasher roots on a supernatural tangent (Hello, Mary Lou), was released direct-to-DVD. Maybe someday it will haunt my television set, but Final Cut didn't leave me champing at the bit for more.

Bait 3D (2012) dir. Kimble Rendall

Yet there was, to no surprise, much ch[o]mping in this Australian "Sharks in a Supermarket" flick. The concept does not stretch much further than that, nor would we want it to. (Though, a case could be made for it bravely venturing outside its comfort zone by also including a "Shark in a Parking Garage Beneath a Supermarket" subplot.) This is director Kimble Rendall's first film after careers in rock music and second-unit direction, and perhaps in consequence of this the film seems as if its been whittled from the creative hands of an entertainer rather than an artist or storyteller. It is, in a couple of words, idiotic fun. Bait 3D's melodramatic dialogue and broadly sketched characters often left me rolling in laughter. Admittedly, the shark action (the raison d'être for this sort of spectacle) is subpar, creating not a lick of genuine tension-- especially in contrast to another recent Australian shark attack flick, The Reef (2010)-- but one cannot help but admire the genuine enthusiasm with which the filmmakers approach their sublimely goofy scenario.

Shark Night 3D (2011) dir. David R. Ellis

I was quite thrilled with the insanity-fueled high Bait 3D had left me with, but I happened to be snowed in on this particular night so followed it up with this gem from the late, great schlockmeister David R. Ellis (helmer of the two best films in the Final Destination series, parts II and IV). The buzz I'd heard from folks upon its release was none too kind, with most harping on its neutered PG-13 style. But I wonder if those reviewers walked in biased because of the ludicrous pretense that PG-13 horror can never be good, because what's here (perhaps in spite of or maybe even because of its self-imposed restraint) is extremely entertaining. Such restraint forces the film to create appeal in its other aspects, which Shark Night does. The risk that runs with total gore freedom is dreck like Silent Night (2012) or even Piranha 3D (2010), the latter of which is a decent film but still rests on its "Gore is entertaining/funny, huh?" laurels and can't bother to be appealing otherwise. (Like, if this movie were made by the director of Silent Night the sharks would have slowly eaten Katharine McPhee's boobs for 10 minutes while Donal Logue poured beer on the wounds and belched.) Shark Night is blankly likeable characters doing silly things in a preposterous situation. I suppose a lot of its appeal for me is it's odd wholesomeness, which is a rare trait in the Grunge City that is '00s-'10s horror. I mean, just look at this. This is the kind of stupidity we need more of in this genre. The villains in Shark Night hate college kids so much that they decide to populate a salt-water lake with various species of sharks and feed said college kids to them so that they can then sell the footage they film of this chomping to the Discovery Channel for Shark Week. Fantastic.

Screamtime (1986) dir. Michael Armstrong & Stanley A. Long

First Maxim: Horror anthologies are intrinsically enjoyable viewing experiences-- a lousy segment or two won't prevent at least one of them from capturing your fancy. (Even the abysmal V/H/S (2012) managed not to disappoint on this count.) Second Maxim: British horror anthologies are best of all. (View all of the Amicus anthologies and then try to mount a counter-argument. You have been dared.) With these general truths in mind, I'm happy to report that Screamtime, a low-budget slasher-inflected British horror anthology from the mid-80s, is certainly a pleasure, if not particularly the strongest example of the form. Though its third and concluding segment (about some sentient killer garden gnomes) is a bit deficient in its execution, the first two segments (the first about the bloody family problems of a beleaguered Punch & Judy show proprietor; the second about a woman receiving disturbing visions of the future after moving into a new house) are excellent slices of thrill 'n' chill. The wraparound segment, about a couple of oafish thieves watching the pilfered segments on their VHS player only to find those segments' antagonists appear in reality, is as much of a flat note as it sounds, though it does provide us a brief but utterly tantalizing glimpse inside of a UK-based video store in the pre-Nasties 1980s. What we see: a veritable wonderland.

The Kindred (1987) dir. Stephen Carpenter & Jeffrey Obrow

The Kindred is one of the best (if not the best) low-budget/high concept/higher effort creature features ever forged, and it's a crime that it's not talked about more often. Part of the problem, one imagines, is its unfortunate relegated-to-VHS status, but allegedly Synapse Films has been formulating a long-gestating remedy to this issue that will hopefully come to pass one day soon. The Kindred boasts an elaborate pseudo-scientific premise that allows for much monster carnage, including (among its greatest hits) a tentacled creature living under the porch and a woman metamorphosing into a fish. The practical effects are as gooey as they are gorgeous, managing at times to be jaw-dropping in intensity and ambition. And the film doesn't settle for visual splendor alone: it also features a group of (relatively speaking) intelligent and mature scientist protagonists who are likeable enough that the film can't bring itself to kill them all. The Kindred is by the same writer/director team who, just a few years prior, assembled the wonderfully gory and grim college slasher The Dorm That Dripped Blood (1982). As good as that earlier film is, The Kindred is leaps and bounds better in formulation and execution, foreshadowing great future genre efforts from this duo that (sadly) never came.

House of Dark Shadows (1970) dir. Dan Curtis

Walking into Dan Curtis's colorful big-screen adaptation of his own daytime black and white soap opera without being at all familiar with the source material was, I'd read in countless reviews, a mistake. The film necessarily condenses plotlines that ran for months on end over countless hours on television, and because of such takes some rather abrupt and jarring narrative leaps. Turns out, I adored House of Dark Shadows specifically because of its refusal to hold my hand while shifting through its dense array of characters and motivations. An astute viewer will have little trouble reconciling all of the film's bits and pieces, and will soon thrill to its sumptuous atmospheric pleasures and its refusal to slacken its mad dash to its gory finish line. This is an American Gothic in the grand and garish Hammer style, and anyone who cherishes that sort of spectacle knows how rare a bird it is. Thank you, Tim Burton, for making this film and its sequel's digital video debuts possible.

Night of Dark Shadows (1971) dir. Dan Curtis

The second Dark Shadows film, Night of Dark Shadows, features the notable absence of first film and series' star, Jonathan Frid, as the vampire Barnabas Collins. It instead features some later Collins descendants at the old Collinwood estate, dealing with seductive ghosts and witches. This does not at all feel like a step down in quality. Unlike House of Dark Shadows, Night is leisurely paced, and that's actually a benefit to its much less visceral concerns. Its manifestations of its haunting are occasionally more subtle than its soap opera origins would lead you to assume, and all the more effective for it. (Of special note in this regard is its wonderful final sequence, which plays for both subtlety and bombast one after the other and pulls off both with class.) Simultaneously, its emphasis on documenting a decaying domestic relationship feels much more in line with typical soap opera subject matter than House's opulent vampire drama, and becomes (as soap operas tend to) rather engrossing over its hour and a half running time. (I'd love to see its long-lost extended cut, which is said to be fuller and more coherent, though I had no trouble at all following or appreciating what was left after the editor put down his scissors.) Night reminded me, in many ways both broad and specific, of a film director Dan Curtis would soon direct, the Oliver Reed and Karen Black haunted house drama Burnt Offerings (1976). Perhaps the later film was an attempt to right the wrongs perpetrated on the former in the editing room? In any case, Curtis provided us two of the very best American-produced haunted house films in only five years back in the 1970s, and that's no small feat.

Death Ship (1980) dir. Alvin Rakoff

Death Ship isn't as good as its poster, but then that's a tough image to live up to. Nonetheless, it's a decent maritime thriller with an imposing haunted Nazi warship as its primary location. George Kennedy is his usual fantastic self as a beyond-cantakerous retiring ship captain who, upon shipwreck and ghostly possession, takes command of the titular ship and sets his fellow survivors up for blood sacrifice. No matter how you cut it, a haunted ship that runs (figuratively if not actually) on human blood is pretty nifty, and if the Nazi angle adds an exploitative angle to it all, well, all the better for this sort of venture. There's some decent horrific imagery (like when one of out heroes falls into a watery cargo hold full of decaying corpses) alongside equally clunky ones (a bloody shower is treated by its screeching recipient as The Most Horrific Thing of All Time while we scratch our heads). To its credit, Death Ship also prominently features two young children among its cast, and their performances (along with a recurring joke about how the little boy has a clearly defective bladder) somehow didn't inspire me to thunk my head repeatedly against the wall whenever they were on screen. So, kudos. The recent blu-ray release of the film from Scorpion Releasing is a fine one, with a rather sharp transfer and some fun supplementary materials.

The Video Dead (1987) dir. Robert Scott

Excellent mindless trash. Its perplexing central conceit (a haunted television set bound for a paranormal research institute winds up in a suburban home and begins spawning vain, life-envying zombies) is so earnestly accepted by the film's characters that, in its own non-logic, we actually come to accept it. The Video Dead knows that it's funny-- most of the time, at least-- and when it doesn't, as in the case of lead actor Rocky Duvall's gee-whiz performance, it's delectable for reasons of amateurish gung-ho. Its wonderful final act, in which our heroine plays housekeeper and hostess to our confused zombie horde in order to avoid being attacked, feels as if it would fit comfortably in Peter Jackson's early genre work. The Video Dead was released for the first time on a digital format in February by Scream Factory as one half of a monsters-in-the-television-centric blu-ray double feature, the other half being the glorious and long-sought-after Terrorvision (1986). To call this the release of the month would be a gross understatement: seeing these neglected films so lovingly preserved and supplemented is enough to warm the cockles of the most jaded of genre fans' hearts.

The Nest (1988) dir. Terence H. Winkless

Another Scream Factory release from last month was Terence H. Winkless's mutant roach flick The Nest. Before a delay of this release, I had scheduled myself to cover it during January's Nature's Grave feature here at the blog. The film fits snugly into the confines of the Animal Terror genre, sporting all the distinguishing features: reckless scientists, mutated wildlife, unconcerned/complicit local authorities, and a half-baked ecological message. Among its peers, it's an unremarkable effort, despite some occasional flashes of Slugs-level gory brilliance and the presence of the ever-adorable Lisa Langlois (who also starred in the much superior but equally scrappy killer rat flick, Deadly Eyes (1982)). Perhaps the film's biggest issue is how little screentime the cockroaches actually have. For a film explicitly about the insect's ick factor, more could have been gained by keeping their physiology grounded in quasi-reality (or maybe taking the exaggerated Creepshow (1982) approach) rather than by promising flesh-eating mutant roaches (see the above poster) that it can't deliver. We're gifted some nifty looking cat-roach and human-roach hybrids, but it says something that the film's best squirm-producing moment is one in which our protagonist fails to notice the roach swimming around in his coffee cup.

The Night Stalker (1972) dir. John Llewellyn Moxey & The Night Strangler (1973) dir. Dan Curtis

More Dan Curtis goodness in the form of two television movies that spawned a later abbreviated series. Kolchak, a perpetually down-on-his-luck crack investigative reporter, is a fabulous character, and Darren McGavin plays him with all the easy underdog charm that's required and then some. Besides the fun creature plots (a bit more interesting in The Night Strangler, with its inverted Frankensteinian overtones), the most enjoyable aspect of the films is Kolchak's explosive friendship with his weaselly editor, Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland). The two are akin to an old bickering couple who can't seem to get rid of one another, despite the constant betrayals and disappointments. Considered together, the films are formulaic (they possess essentially identical plots, with different creatures and locations subbed in), but because it's such a satisfying formula it's difficult to complain about. (My understanding of the later Kolchak series is that it continues the basic formula established in these films, in essence creating the Monster of the Week plot adopted in-part by later series like The X-Files and Fringe.) My hope is to return to the world of Kolchak, and soon.

Ganja & Hess (1973) dir. Bill Gunn

Logline: During a tussle with his suicidal assistant, anthropologist Hess Green (Duane Jones) is stabbed with an ancient African dagger, causing him to develop an insatiable appetite for blood. When the assistant's wife, Ganja (Marlene Clark), arrives at Hess's home looking for her husband, she promptly moves in and begins to uncover the doctor's dark secret while falling in love with him. The couple soon descend into a nightmarish cycle of passion, addiction, and blood.

The potentially winning financial prospects for a black vampire film in the year after Blacula's massive success inspired Kelly/Jordan Productions to greenlight just such a project, placing their faith in producer Chiz Schultz to deliver an inexpensive slice of simplistic, easy-to-sell blaxploitation horror. Instead of aiming for that hard-to-miss goalpost, Schultz approached African American actor/playwright/screenwriter/author Bill Gunn with the project. Gunn wasn't at all interested in making a black vampire movie, but was very interested in directing a feature film, so accepted the job, figuring he could manipulate and transform the proposed vampire angle into a theme that interested him. The film produced from this uneasy marriage, Ganja & Hess, wound up resembling nothing close to a blaxploitation film, barring its use of an entirely black cast. Rather, Gunn's brilliant and chilling film was infected by the bug of independent 1970s arthouse cinema. In its direction, writing, and cinematography, Ganja & Hess has far more in common with John Cassavettes's early directorial output-- Shadows (1959), Faces (1968)-- than with Blackenstein (1973). The film is suffused with meandering conversations (equally as full of inanities as of profundities), disembodying close-ups of the actors, and frequent frightening dips into the well of nigh inscrutable surrealistic imagery. The film's distributors, horrified and befuddled by the seemingly unsaleable product Gunn and Schultz made with their money, mercilessly cut the film from its original running time of 113 minutes down to a breezy and incoherent 78, jettisoning all the material ancillary to their top priority for the film (blood-drinking). This version of the film, re-titled Blood Couple (and then given innumerable other titles for its various home video releases), though an affront to Gunn's original intentions for the film, was the only available version of the film for several decades after its brief theatrical release as Ganja & Hess (which included an acclaimed stop at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival).

What's lost in a re-edit of the film focusing on vampirism is that Ganja & Hess is a film concerned with addiction, not monster movie lore. These vampires walk in sunlight, drink their blood from cups, and haven't the ability to flap away into the night air as bats. (Though Hess, a wealthy and solitary man, does inhabit his own Dracula-esque mansion). The characters' vampirism is symbolic, pointing towards the codependent relationships spawned by addiction and the inevitable destruction they cause. (What addiction, precisely, the film's vampirism is symbolic of is left deliberately obscure. One might choose to read the characters' names as providing a hint, but the film most often seems to lean towards an addiction to sexual desire. Neither those nor any other explanation seem to fit the film precisely, which may indicate the film's decision to present a universal portrayal of addiction through fantasy, making it easily applicable to the real disease's numerous forms. Vampirism as addiction is a thematic device that's found its own comfortable niche in the artsy horror cinema of recent years, particularly in Abel Ferrara's The Addiction (1995), Larry Fessenden's Habit (1997), and Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day (2001).) 

Consequent to its emphasis on addiction, the film ponders issues of personal responsibility when a person is afflicted: is Hess, a person who has admittedly killed others to satiate his own, a criminal or a victim? A murderer or an innocent? Moreover, where's the dividing line between desire and need, and how are we capable of discerning which is which, of justifying anything as a desperate, uncontrollable need? (Hess's awkward, poetic, and suicidal assistant, George Meda (played by Bill Gunn himself), sums this dilemma up nicely in a monologue in which he asks Hess, rhetorically, "Do you know what hunger is?") When Hess selfishly shares his addiction with Ganja in order to bring them closer together, it in fact only tears them farther apart: Ganja, who is honest about her focus on her own self-interest and who has seen herself since childhood as a literal disease who infects others, learns to embrace her bloodlust while Hess, who is revolted at her behavior, his own behavior, or some combination of the two, chooses to save himself through a purifying-- and fatal-- embrace of the Christian religion. The film's offered conclusions to these issues and questions (especially those displayed in its enigmatic final scene) are provocative while being (at best) ambiguous. (Which is fitting, as the film itself is an ambiguous beast, mostly caused by its hallucinatory, discontinuous editing courtesy of editor Victor Kanefsky, who admits in an interview on Kino Lorber's excellent blu-ray release that he never bothered to look at the script while putting the film together.) If nothing else concrete, Ganja & Hess seems to posit that addiction is a natural force, a fact of life that we must either accept or fight against. None of us are immune, and we all have out own defining personal issues, Ganja explains to Hess. Our addictions only vary in their focus, and we can always learn to share them with one another: "You're into horror movies," she tells him, "I can dig it."

Sugar Hill (1974) dir. Paul Maslansky

Logline: After her man is murdered by a group of white gangster businessmen for refusing to sell them his voodoo-themed nightclub, Diana "Sugar" Hill (Marki Bey) casts aside her disbelief in order to summon some supernatural revenge against the racist killers with the assistance of Baron Samedi (Don Pedro Colley), voodoo lord of the dead, and his gang of merciless zombie minions.

Another American International Pictures/Samuel Z. Arkoff production, Sugar Hill is in almost every way a typical revenge film. It presents a belabored progression of one-by-one murders, with only the methods varying, supported by a moral certitude that runs unquestioned throughout the film, despite the fact that this certitude results in helpless schmucks being coldly murdered while whimpering for the preservation of their lives. Being typical and formulaic, Sugar Hill doesn't allow us to think too hard about the moral quandaries it necessarily poses, but that's because its filmmakers clearly don't want us to recognize them in the first place: they want us to enjoy the uncritical catharsis of seeing The Man get his. And because Sugar Hill is a quite well-made typical revenge film, we do enjoy it. Moreover, putting aside the recognizable ordinariness of its plot and story progression allows us to see that the film is bolstered by a relative wealth of delectable supernatural touches that set it apart from the slew of other revenge films littering the cinemas throughout the 1970s (including a not inconsiderable number of them falling under the blaxploitation banner, the foremost examples being Jack Hill's Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974)). Bullets and bare-knuckled brawls are traded in for fog-coated swampland, cobwebbed zombies with bugged-out brass eyeballs, and Baron Samedi's mischievous cackle disappearing into the night. If not an alteration of the revenge film's foundations, Sugar Hill at the very least offers an unusual and (literally) spirited take on the familiar tale.

The film does deal with issues of race throughout, though never extensively or critically. Because it's a simple revenge tale, its villains are all unambiguously villainous and racist (and are also, barring two interesting exceptions, all middle aged white men). They call our protagonist a "black bitch" and her murdered lover a "dead nigger." They punch and abuse their black employees while condescending to the rest: Morgan (Robert Quarry), the gang's leader, tells one of his main thugs (the only black man he has allowed to rise to this station) that he'll "make an honest negro" out of him yet. Worst of all is Morgan's girlfriend, Celeste (Betty Anne Rees), who makes her racism apparent by refusing to serve a black person a drink but all too willing to smash the bottle over that same person's head. So Sugar Hill's desire to exact revenge against these murderous and hateful creeps isn't without cause, but her actions in doing so are dealt with in too shallow a manner to offer any interesting critique or commentary about race or the nature of vengeance. She invokes dark forces to get the job done, but is relieved of having to pay any material or spiritual price for the help. (In making an almost-clever joke out of the racist fear, the film ends with the sexuality-oozing Baron Samedi carrying off the helpless-- and helplessly racist-- white girl to the underworld in place of Sugar.) More importantly, Sugar facilitates the murder of a number of weeping men and is changed not at all by her decision or the experience of watching them die before her eyes: she remains cool, collected, unflinching, dare we say superfly after each notch added to the body count. Upon her revenge's completion, she fully intends to return to her life as it was before this whole mess, unpunished and only vaguely suspected by the authorities. She may even choose to explore her new budding romance with the charming cop she had to push out of the way (and down a flight of stairs by way of a voodoo doll) when her bloody business was preoccupying her thoughts and time. (How soon dead lovers-- those whose memory is fought for-- are forgotten! O, most wicked speed!) There's much to enjoy about the film on a technical level (cinematography, performances, music, make-up and costuming are all top notch for this sort of low-budget genre offering), but thematically it's all a little too black and white.

Abby (1974) dir. William Girdler

Logline: During an archaeological research trip to Nigeria, Bishop Garnet Williams (William Marshall) unwittingly unleashes the African Yoruba trickster spirit Eshu, which then hops on a transcontinental flight and implants itself in Williams's daughter-in-law, a marriage counselor named Abby (Carol Speed). Under Eshu's devilish influence, Abby hurls around potty language, drools milk, grows some mean eyebrows, and chats up all the men down at the bar. Will Williams be able to return to America fast enough tie a bib onto Abby, exorcize her demon, and save her eternal soul?

William Girdler's Abby was hardly the only film to brazenly ride the box office cash wave that Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973) stirred up in the mid-1970s (Beyond the Door (1974), Şeytan (1974), Magdalena, Possessed by the Devil (1974), and Exorcismo (1975) are all as guilty), yet nonetheless it was the one to suffer Warner Brothers' wrath, being sued nearly out of existence by the studio after a short but lucrative run in theaters. (Unlike the others, Abby was an American production and so more susceptible to copyright claims. It's worth noting: Warner won the lawsuit). American International Pictures, having made their quick buck, allowed Abby to languish in obscurity for decades afterwards, and the film's availability in the U.S. has been plagued ever since by ownership questions, degraded prints, and subpar home video releases, all of which have done little to salvage the film's reputation.  Girdler, who was in the prime of a very productive exploitation movie career and would tragically die in a helicopter accident in 1978 at the all-too-young age of 30, went of after Abby's completion and disappearance to do more blaxploitation (Sheba, Baby (1975)) and horror (Grizzly (1976), Day of the Animals (1977), The Manitou (1978). Grizzly, the most unabashed of Jaws ripoffs (obscuring the infringement merely by replacing the shark with a bear), demonstrates that Abby's fate had little effect on the sort of films he signed on to make. Exploitation-- even exploitation of other films-- was his game for life.

Divorced from its post-release baggage, Abby isn't all that bad. Warner Brothers' complaint wasn't unfounded-- it is fundamentally The Exorcist with an African American cast, cashing in on two fads at once-- but there are enough differences in tone and style to make them divergent viewing experiences. In contrast to its prestige-oozing forebear, Abby is an inventive and amusing cheapie that plays itself up for entertainment value. Its gravely serious script belies the visual fun the film has with Carol Speed's goofy, milk-spewing performance as the demonically influenced Abby, who curses like the meanest of sailors while tossing drunken sleazeballs around a bar with her mind. Her being an adult also allows for more overt sexuality than Linda Blair's teenaged Regan was capable of (though nothing here-- like Abby's erotic showertime-- comes close to besting the explicitness of Regan's violent crucifix masturbation). But then, the film fails to use this advantage in order to make any coherent commentary upon 1970s sexual mores, taboos, and hypocrisies because, again, Abby's demonic sexuality is played for giggles: in one scene, she leads a randy but conflicted man to his automobile for some hanky panky, which we see from outside the car as it comically rocks back and forth and fills up with hellfire smoke. Another interesting difference is how Abby downplays the power of its possessing demon, with Blacula's William Marshall portraying a bishop who coolly labels the demon a fraud and easily expels him from his young host. Besides the bishop's brief inciting sojourn to Africa and some small but ultimately inconsequential lip-service paid to African religious belief, the film avoids incorporating any contemporary social issues involving race into its plot, which makes it a very hollow vessel indeed. It does, however, employ a pretty smooth generic funk soundtrack, so I can't bring myself to accuse it of being totally bereft of soul.

J. D.'s Revenge (1976) dir. Arthur Marks

Logline: In 1942, a New Orleans hustler named J. D. (David McKnight) and his sister are murdered in a slaughterhouse. Thirty years later, Ike (Glynn Turman), a law student and cab driver, sees a vision of their murders while under hypnosis during a stage show. In the days that follow Ike begins to take on the characteristics, mannerisms, and appearance of the violent J. D., frightening those closest to him. J. D.'s possession of Ike is necessary for the achievement of his ghostly goal: revenge from beyond the grave against those who wronged him.

It begins, inexplicably, in a slaughterhouse. A first person perspective camera leads us down a dingy, unhygienic, soft-focused hallway towards the sounds of arguing voices. The man whose perspective we've been sharing is revealed to us: a well-dressed man, far too well dressed for this setting. He stops just outside the doorway of a large room and spies on what he finds inside. The room is full of carcasses, dead cows processed and stripped of their skin, hanging from hooks as meat yet to be butchered. In the center of all this are a man and a woman, the man yelling and the woman laughing, making the scene a vague spiritual predecessor to the opening scene of Jean Rollin's Fascination (1979). At this point, the content of their conversation means little to us, but we grasp the general dynamic and we fear that the situation is about to come to a head. Perhaps we understand this better than they do: the man, unable to control himself, removes a straight razor from his jacket pocket and with no warning slashes the laughing woman's throat. In slow motion she throws her head back, her  laughter insupressible, her throat gaping from its new wound, her face frozen in a smile as she falls. A revolving carousel of well-dressed men then circle into various positions around her corpse-- another one for the meat hooks-- as one of the men flees, the other takes his place kneeling by her, and the last arrives to take the place of observer. It's an enigmatic way for the film to begin, and the screen will return to images of it throughout, each time altering what we've seen in surreal but significant ways: the meat turns back into cows as we watch their throats be cut, the woman is strung feet first among the carcasses, blood pours steaming down floor drains. The only constant is the smile on the dying woman's face.

J. D.'s Revenge is a fine film, but it never approaches the power of that opening sequence. The acting is certainly powerful: Glynn Turman's physical and psychological transformation from the gentle and good-natured Ike into the raging, hormonal, flamboyant beast J. D. is rather remarkable, and Lou Gossett's pew-hopping performance as Reverend Elija Bliss is certainly energetic. But, otherwise, it's merely a well-plotted revenge thriller with a subtle mystery at its core (we know the solution to the puzzle from the outset, but the pieces are pleasantly blurred and amorphous). I simply can't find much subtext here, race-oriented or otherwise. Of mild interest is the fact that J. D.'s possession of Ike finds the young black man-- a law student aspiring to a better life after past indiscretions-- lapsing back into old and eventually even worse ways, but it falls short of making any sort of class commentary. In one early scene, post-hypnotic possession, Ike looks into a mirror and sees the visage of J. D. staring back at him, the seeming Hyde to his Jekyll. But the two men are not one in the same, as the film strives to assure us of, rather than leaving us with nagging doubts or ambiguities about whether or not J. D.'s woman-beating, granny violence, and two-timing mirrors Ike's own internal instability: revenge completed, J. D.'s ghost exits Ike's body and allows him to strut out gaily into the sunshine arm-in-arm with his pals, the only baggage he's saddled with from his horrifying experience being a new hairdo.