The Unseen (1980) dir. Danny Steinmann

Logline: After arriving to cover the local holiday parade, a freelance reporter, Jennifer (Barabara Bach), and her two gal pals find themselves stranded in a small town with no vacant motel rooms. By chance they run into an over-friendly museum owner, Ernest (Sydney Lassick), who-- upon hearing their predicament-- all too eagerly invites the trio to spend the night in the home he shares with his sister, Virginia (Lelia Goldini). Thinking they've caught a break, the three young women have in fact caught their own collective doom, courtesy of something Ernest and Virginia have been keeping locked in the basement for twenty years...

Crime in the Past: A brother and a sister love one another, or perhaps they just got bored one day twenty years previous. Brother + Sister = Mutant baby. In some small towns, it is exactly this equation that basements are constructed in preparation for. "Rural playpens," they're called, or so I've heard.

Bodycount: 4, never to be seen or unseen again.

Themes/Moral Code: It's a film about parenting, both good and bad, and how our actions as parents and our genetic predispositions warp our poor offspring into terrible mutant beasts. Obviously, the film is critical of Ernest and Virginia Keller's incestual relationship, as we see from the fact that it results in the birth of a horrifically deformed child. But, on the other hand, the film isn't exclusively shaming backwoods mating habits: the Kellers's monstrous son is essentially a loving and obedient child towards his parents, and it can be argued that only their lifelong neglect of him and his emotional needs drives him to twisted behavior. Though his is a twisted behavior that is, not coincidentally, much like that of his perverted father's. Consequent of this uncertainty over the killer child's behavioral origin, we've got threads of the "nature vs. nurture" debate running underneath the film's action throughout, all of which come to a head in Jennifer's predicament: she's pregnant with the child of her violently abusive boyfriend, and she must decide whether or not she wants to keep the child and risk seeing what sort of person that child grows up to be. Prior to her harrowing encounter with Ernest and Virginia's offspring, Jennifer appears resolved to carry her child to term (witness her crumpling up her abortion prescription), but the last act of the movie gives her an experience in the trials of parenting that should raise some doubts in her mind. Placed in seclusion with the film's childlike killer, Jennifer attempts to become a surrogate mother to him in order to save her own hide, and she finds her trial run at parenting to be a mixed bag. Her stern, motherly affection can hold the childish monster in place momentarily, but not forever, as eventually the bestial instincts win out. Jennifer learns that raising children is , well, tough and that-- despite all of one's efforts to the contrary-- the kid still might grow up to be a fiend. Neither genetic parentage nor careful parenting are any guarantee. Abortion at least provides some certainty.

Killer's Motivation: One of slasherdom's more sympathetic villains, our mutant killer, "Junior" Keller (Stephen Furst), can't help his murderous predilections. A deformed, mentally impaired child in a watery-eyed adult's body, Junior acts on impulse, and unfortunately those impulses result in him collecting and handling the bodies of human women as if they were dolls (we see that the boy loves stuffed animals, but he's obviously never been taught how to care for his possessions, particularly those that writhe around and scream in protest). As for a deeper subconscious motivation, it's apparent that Junior has been physically and emotionally abused through his lifelong imprisonment in the Kellers's basement, so that might be one cause of his psychosis. But a second explanation seems both simpler and more poignant: Junior displays that he's a Momma's Boy through his actions in the final act, but, because he's been ignored and neglected by his traumatized mother throughout his existence, his desire for love manifests itself only as simultaneous violence and affection against the various mother proxies he encounters (i.e. any fertile female). The boy probably just needed a hug somewhere along the line.

Final Girl: Barbara Bach's Jennifer is a successful news reporter whose independence and self-determination in her career bleed over into her personal life. At the beginning of the film, we witness her leaving her abusive pro football player boyfriend, Tony (Douglas Barr), whose obsession with recovering from an ankle injury has transformed him into a frustrated, woman-beating prick. When he follows her to the small town that her assignment takes her to and tries to confront her about their relationship "problems," Jennifer greets him with the quip, "Beat up any more women today?" But despite Jennifer's seeming flippancy towards her recent ex-lover, the break isn't as clean as she might wish: she's pregnant with his child. Through the character of Jennifer we see society's desire to squash the individual played out under the auspices of conforming to traditional gender roles and family models. Jennifer cares much more about her career and personal goals, stating that she might one day wish to start a family, but certainly not today. But it ain't that easy.

The societal pressures from those around Jennifer-- Tony acting as their chief representative-- encouraging her to abandon those independent desires and become a selfless mother are palpable, creating uncertainty within Jennifer's mind about what actions she should take. Her horrific experience with Junior Keller is, in a way, her maternity trial period. While she shows resourcefulness in dealing with the dangerously childish Junior, she also demonstrates that she's not quite prime mother material. She's revolted by her proxy "child" and the maternal responsibility she must take on as a burden in order to survive: for Jennifer, motherhood is clearly lacking in those profound, instinctual joys that our family-oriented culture assures us exist for everyone. Which direction she ultimately chooses between independence and motherhood is left unresolved by the film, and this omission feels like a significant flaw. Nonetheless, it's quite telling that the strongest image of mothering the film provides us is that of a regretful mother cradling her child for the first and only time as he lies on the ground as a corpse. Not every person is capable, ready, or interested in becoming a parent, society. Look what happens when you force the point.

Evaluation: The Unseen is a peculiar but awfully entertaining quasi-slasher/basement mutant thriller from director Danny Steinmann, he of the leather-clad Linda Blair rape-revenge epic Savage Streets (1984) and my second favorite but first weirdest entry in the Friday the 13th franchise, Part V: A New Beginning (1985). Those films having been produced later than this one, we can consider The Unseen as being Steinmann's humble beginnings (so humble, in fact, that he took his name off the finished film in shame. The film's direction is credited to the nonexistent 'Peter Foleg'). But there's nothing one wishes could remain unseen here: carried by its histrionic performances, clothespin-eroticism, and a smattering of sleaze, the film works despite an unnecessarily drawn-out third act that doubles as a tedious crash-course in demented parenting. Slasher devotees will be-- if not pleased-- at least appreciative of the film's creative mining of various trademarks of the subgenre placed into a rural Gothic context, from a faceless killer messily dispatching young women from out of frame down to the final girl's shock discovery of her companions' arranged corpses.

March 2013's Footstones

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

Absurd (Rosso sangue) (1981) dir. Joe D'Amato

Absurd is Joe D'Amato and George Eastman's quasi-sequel to their own Anthropophagus (1980). Though the former begins where the latter ends (with a disemboweled Eastman stumbling about), similarities cease immediately thereafter. Something is lost in retrofitting Anthropophagus' moody, often quiet, gore-leaking atmosphere into Absurd's bombastic, Halloween-ripping slasher tropes. It feels wrong to call Anthropophagus a subtle film (if we consider the fetus-munching and all), but in comparison with its successor it's unquestionably the film more willing to allow dread to breed in the viewer through a lack of action. Absurd tries a bit too hard to be an action-packed American slasher (of course it can't completely succeed: this one is Italian to the bone), and so feels more like a tightly assembled Greatest Hits package for the peaking subgenre. Fun, clever, and messy-- assuredly-- but because of its safe (if manic-paced) plumbing of conventionality, Absurd can only express a creative originality through slight twists on stock situations (of particular note is the superbly tense sequence in which a bed-ridden preteen girl must escape from her confining traction apparatus to evade Eastman). A decapitating finale cements my appreciation for the film, but it's fair to say my heart rests more with tortured, sun-blistered, gut-munching cannibals than lumbering, self-regenerating, bearded, wavy-maned night stalkers.

Deadtime Stories (1986) dir. Jeffrey Delman

Deadtime Stories is a horror anthology film that gives an intermittently mid-'80s approach to classic fairy tales, mushing tones and time periods together into an occasionally captivating jumble of stories and ideas that is in fact quite well summarized by casting a glance at that poster to your right. The film does indeed shove a mess of disparate elements down our throats, but despite the pained expression of the poor man in the poster it's not an entirely unpleasant viewing experience. A humorous wraparound about a drunken uncle regaling a sleepless child with sloppily told fairy tales bridges our three increasingly ridiculous segments together. Though perhaps an intentional progression, this devolution of the film into a full-fledged comedy as the uncle becomes restless and annoyed over having to tell yet another story is also a pretty big problem considering the overlong nature of the first segment (concerning some witches and their slave boy) and the fact that the strong sense of demented humor displayed in the final tale (a murderous riff on Goldilocks) leaves it feeling set apart from its more straight-faced peers. Nonetheless, Deadtime Stories is brief and diverting, with fantastic practical special effects throughout. My only true gripe is that the singular 1980s charm is restricted exclusively to the sadly forgettable second story (about a spunky, teenaged, color coordinated red sweater and pants-wearing Red Riding Hood who neglects to bring Grandmother her meds in favor of boinking her boyfriend in a shed) and the film's opening tune, which manages to namedrop Hitchcock, De Palma, and Romero in the same line, leading to comparisons between their work and itself which it should probably wish to avoid.

Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama (1988) dir. David DeCoteau

Though far from what most sentient beings would refer to as "a good film," David DeCoteau's exquisitely titled Ghoulies-in-a-bowling-alley flick, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama, is irresistibly enjoyable. Reveling in sophomoric humor and barely competent lunacy, the film takes a largely predictable spin on the old maxim in re: monkey's paws and wish-granting genies: "Be careful what you wish for!" (Though the genie here is more accurately a foul-mouthed, trophy-dwelling imp puppet with a drunken operator.) Though there are moments of pleasing cartoon violence, the bad wishes instead generally result in some kinky sex comedy "eroticism" that allows for the rampant ogling of bosoms, buttressed by some early sorority hazing sadomasochism with a paddle and some rear ends. (A scene that's led one salivating Wikipedia writer to opine: "This proved to be one of the best spanking scenes in mainstream film and helped the film to become a cult favorite.") The star of the film is the incomparable Linnea Quigley as the nihilistic juvenile delinquent Spider, and she's perhaps never been better than here as she forms an unlikely platonic bond with the nerdy Calvin (Andras Jones) and sends the wicked imp back into the bowling trophy from which he sprung.

Black Candles (Los ritos sexuales del diablo) (1982) dir. José Ramón Larraz

While Larraz uses sleazy eroticism in films like The House That Vanished (1974) and Vampyres (1974) in service of his story and in the hope of producing Freudian psychosexual unease, Black Candles-- emerging nearly a decade later when the director had fewer opportunities for getting his films made-- is little more than satanic softcore with the revolting inclusion of a goat in its demon seeded orgies. The film brings erotic horror to new patience-testing lows, its gigantic shrug of a horror plot existing solely to occupy the screen in the bits between the dry humpings. Because the film is so totally uninterested in imparting any feeling or emotion through its copious erotic activity, we're left having to conclude that the film exists solely to titillate, and poorly at that. Authors Pete Tombs and Cathal Tohill report in their book Immoral Tales: European Sex and Horror Films, 1956-1984 that Larraz was embarrassed with the film, and it's not too taxing to discern why.

Boardinghouse (1982) dir. John Wintergate

Boardinghouse is an early shot-on-video horror film, and perhaps the most ambitious and cheekily demented of them all. Writer/director John Wintergate casts himself as Jim, a wealthy and perpetually shirtless landlord who rents the remainder of the rooms in his large house to a gaggle of likewise perpetually shirtless young women. The premise sets us up for a sleazier ego-driven affair than the film ultimately delivers, for which we can all remain grateful. While there's a smidgen of hanky panky, the bulk is devoted to odd spurts of cornball humor, perplexing early video effect-addled slasher killings, and supernatural ESP shenanigans falling somewhere just shy of Blood Beat (1983) on the insanity scale. Clocking in at a flabby-considering-the-paucity-of-story ninety-eight minutes, it's assured to grate on the patience of most viewers, but there's more than enough inventive weirdness for those willing to accept the faults and the decidedly amateurish sheen.

Dr. Jekyll & His Women (Docteur Jekyll et les femmes) (1982) dir. Walerian Borowczyk

Dr. Jekyll & His Women is the first film by Walerian Borowczyk I've had the pleasure of viewing, and it has fast made me anxious to devour the rest of his lengthy filmography. Though it significantly-- nearly explicitly (Hyde's giant prosthetic penis, I'm looking at you)-- amps up the sexual and sadomasochistic tendencies only latent in Robert Louis Stevenson's novel, what's incredible is how faithful Borowczyk's film is to the novel's presentation of the Jekyll/Hyde dynamic, if not the particulars of its plot. As in the novel, the sheer primal joy Jekyll feels at being able to transform into Hyde and let his id run wild by shirking his public face is the emphasis. To transform into the rape-happy Hyde, Borowczyk's Jekyll (the fabulous Udo Kier) must roll around in a tub full of blood-colored chemicals, and whenever he does so (which is, greedily, multiple times over the course of a single night) he appears to be at the height of orgasmic ecstasy. This Jekyll, like the novel's, is not at war with Hyde, but is Hyde. The film uses its isolated castle and overnight lodging party guests to reveal-- rightly so-- that Jekyll's condition isn't unique to him, and that perhaps we all have a Hyde within us that we're eager to set loose, if only we can discover some secret formula for evading the hypocritical pressures to behave that society places on us. (See: the General's (Patrick Magee) enthusiastic Hyde-like whipping of his sexually active daughter, and the willing curiosity of Jekyll's fiancee, Fanny Osbourne (Marina Pierro), to experience his chemical freedom and the violently emancipating actions she takes under its influence.) Borowczyk's visual style, replete with extreme closeups and discontinuous editing, is an intimate, claustrophobic marvel, and Dr. Jekyll & His Women is a mature and disturbing probe of the seedier, but perhaps more liberated, side of human nature. Expect to see some further words on this film here at the blog at some future date.

Silent Madness (1984) dir. Simon Nuchtern

One of the more tiresome slashers I've seen in some time. Silent Madness (in axe-flinging 3-D) makes the unconventional choice of mostly neglecting to spend any quality time with its sorority sister victims. Rather, the film centers on a pair of adults-- a medical psychologist and a local newspaper reporter-- who attempt to apprehend a neglectfully released homicidal lunatic in-between sessions of batting their eyelashes at each other. Loading a slasher film with mature protagonists is rarely a poor move, but placing them (for the majority of the film) out of direct peril sucks dry any immediate tension, the abundance of which is a dire necessity in a film in this mode, and the fact that spending so much time with them prevents us from getting to know-- much less distinguish between!-- the sorority sisters makes their inevitable deaths feel all the more perfunctory, as inspired as they might occasionally be. (See: a particularly gleeful-- and particularly '80s-- double homicide involving workout equipment and the arcade version of Dragon's Lair, in 3-D.) If the film has one thing going in its favor, it's an almost un-slasher-like subplot concerning the wild abuses of medical institutions that violate human rights while assuming authority of the management of hostile human bodies. But this queasy sci-fi tangent doesn't elevate the film: it instead leaves the film feeling more confused about what it aims to be. The film is no Hospital Massacre (1982) or Alone in the Dark (1982), both of which easily folded similar medical concerns into the slasher formula and became all the more thematically rich for them. Silent Madness is primarily rich in yawns.

The Uninvited (1944) dir. Lewis Allen

A puzzlingly well-regarded ghost yarn from the classic horror era, The Uninvited is brimming with much too much corny, folksy humor that deflates (one imagines unintentionally) all of the few horror bits, which barely register on the horror scale to begin with. At times the film more closely resembles a less-spirited (pun optional) foray into the contemporaneous romantic comedy genre, though with the perplexing distinction of the central couple being a brother and sister (Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey) cohabiting a (barely) haunted house. This romantic comedy tone becomes an issue when we notice that not even our protagonists are frightened by the ghost that appears every evening in their new abode. If they're not the slightest bit uneasy, how could we possibly be? The film concludes with Milland's character actually laughing and wagging a finger at the ghostly apparition in front of him until it vanishes in shame, back into the ether. The film's needlessly complicated plot doesn't help matters much either, as it serves to only confuse the viewer and dedicate much of her remaining attention to its fruitless unraveling. The architecture of the haunted seaside house is rendered in a mundane contemporary style, and while this is a refreshing move away from the Gothic tradition it's a choice let down by the bland and workmanlike cinematography, which never attempts to capture the eerie quality that even relatively modern domestic structures can possess in the dead of night.

Images (1972) dir. Robert Altman

Images is one of Robert Altman's least often seen and talked about films, probably because it's one of his least "Altmanesque." Weird to say, because the film features many of his already-fully-developed signature stylistic touches (overlapping dialogue, ambiguous plot points), but Images differs from its obvious descendant in Altman's filmography, 3 Women (1977), in that it's wrapped snugly around a conventional psychological thriller story and concludes rather neatly with a definite (and not unexpected) closing revelation concerning the psychological state and prior actions of its tortured protagonist (Susannah York). This results in the film occupying a peculiar place in '70s cinema: it's too weird for the bulk of the psychological thriller crowd, but also ultimately too ordinary for the arthouse filmgoers. I think the pat quality of its resolution and some of its symbolism (the film returns on numerous occasions to the protagonist assembling a jigsaw puzzle) distracts from the complex psychological portrait of York's character painted throughout the film: that of a woman at war with her own desires, a conflict creating fluctuating perceptions of the men in her life-- both those present and absent-- that terrify her and threaten to collapse her various lives and identities into one messy, unfathomable jumble. It's an often startling film, with an impeccable score and lush cinematography revealing the vast, isolating nature of the Irish countryside that abandons York among the rolling hills with nothing but her multiple selves for company.

The Seventh Victim (1943) dir. Mark Robson

The Seventh Victim was a revelatory film experience. Frankly, I hadn't previously imagined a cheap horror production from so early in the genre's life could have mined such philosophical and psychological depths to such devastating effect. It's the best of the Val Lewton RKO horror productions I've seen thus far (now that's an accomplishment), and, moreover, one of the best early Hollywood films I've encountered, period. Dripping with stark but softly lit black and white compositions and morose, sleepwalking performances, the film is a dejected, nihilistic, minor-key masterpiece. Regardless of her sparse screen time, Jean Brooks is a captivating stoic presence as the tragic and doomed Jacqueline, pursued as desperately by her own depression as by the sinister forces out to silence her. Even when stripped of its admittedly toothless primary horror element (the passive satanic cult, so easily swayed from its devilish beliefs by only the slightest bit of preaching) the film remains an undeniable-- if experimental and unfortunately neglected-- pinnacle of the genre, wallowing in the most mundane but paralyzing of horrors: that of continued existence.

I Walked with a Zombie (1943) dir. Jacques Tourneur

I Walked with a Zombie is another Lewton-produced horror classic with an atmosphere almost more oppressive and mournful than The Seventh Victim's. The entire film feels like a protracted funeral procession, from which none of the participants wish to depart. Despite being produced in the 1940s and being set in the Caribbean with a largely black supporting cast, the film manages to toe the fine line between exploitation of indigenous cultural beliefs for moody and atmospheric chills and respect for the genuine power those beliefs seem to carry. This balance is probably best observed in the towering, bug-eyed zombie guardian Carre-Four (Darby Jones), who we're allowed to perceive as unnerving before the revelation of his total benevolence. Better yet, the film unambiguously asserts that the villains here (though such a term is difficult to bandy about) are the white settlers who have used the voodoo religion of the natives foolishly and unthinkingly, producing an unnatural (if harmless) creature, an undead physical reminder of their sins that locks their family into a painful and destructive stasis from which they cannot escape, even as it rots them from the inside.

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.

Empire of the Ants (1977) dir. Bert I. Gordon

Logline: Land developer Marilyn Fryser (Joan Collins) carts a group of prospective buyers over to her worthless island property. What remains unclear is if the land's value increases or decreases upon the discovery of a colony of gigantic mutant ants that have taken up residence.

Animal of Choice: Sometimes horse-sized, sometimes elephant-sized mutant ants.

Thinking Ecologically: Over the opening credits, a group of men in radiation suits stand on a ship out at sea and roll barrel upon barrel of radioactive toxic waste into the ocean. One of these barrels washes up on shore, begins to leak, infects ants. There you have it. What's notable about this ecological disaster is how forthright and uncomplicated it is. Generally the disaster or pollution in this sort of film is caused through ignorance or accident, which creates a sense of unease as it forces the viewer to question what sort of unknown pollution could be affecting their own world. Here, the pollution is deliberate and unambiguous, sucking some of the real world dread out of things. We never discover who these polluters are or what their game is. What a loss. (One other small point: it's fitting that a sleazy land developer and her clients end up as the mutant ants' victims, though the film never bothers making this connection as wickedly clever as it might.)

Thinking About Animals: Some opening narration over stock footage announces that ants will be the "next dominant life form of our planet," taking pains to draw parallels between the actions and behaviors of ants and humans. Upon concluding, the narrator asks, rhetorically, "Scary, isn't it?" Maybe, until we actually meet the mutant ants. They're big, hairy, clumsy brutes who mostly scream like insectile banshees and appear to walk on hind legs. For most of the film they're a disappointment: where's the strategy for world domination fueled by the collective mind of the colony, as our narrator promised? We don't see much of this until the end, when the survivors discover that the ants have taken over the minds and wills of the occupants of the island's town through use of their queen's pheromones. The townspeople are dosed with the pheromones weekly, convincing them that they must work to serve and protect the queen (primarily by keeping the colony well fed by way of the local sugar refinery). This is a fun idea, though its execution reeks of lazy 1950s science fiction motion pictures. The ants are never threatening or interesting. The odd ways in which the real-life ant footage is cut into the film makes it so that the ants hardly even ever act like ants. The film's best scene is one in which the survivors stumble across a conflict between some black and red ants in the middle of the forest. It works because, for a moment, we can pretend we're watching a nature documentary and not Empire of the Ants.

Evaluation in Brief: Director Bert I. Gordon's late career is a holdover from the 1950s' science fiction monster fad. During that decade and part of the one following, he developed a dubious reputation for making films about super-sized monsters, like War of the Colossal Beast (1958) and Attack of the Puppet People (1958), with rear projection and trick photography techniques. They were dreadful films, existing solely for their visual gimmicks, and popular appraisal has not treated them kindly (eight of Gordon's films appeared on Mystery Science Theater 3000, eclipsing the contributions of any other director). Though still making films throughout the '70s, he hadn't made a giant-sized film since 1965's Village of the Giants, and it appears as if the Animal Terror boom of the latter part of the decade encouraged American International Pictures to give him the opportunity to flex his meager talents once again with The Food of the Gods (1976) and Empire of the Ants (1977), both of which purport to be adaptations of tales by H.G. Wells (they're not). Suffice it to say, Gordon's bag of tricks does not translate particularly well into the context of the late '70s. Empire of the Ants is simplistic, hokey dreck that would perhaps seem charming if it didn't already appear so desperate to connect with a modern movie-going audience by throwing in some halfhearted attempts at sex and gore. It's so out of step in its generic storytelling that it feels as if it's been brought to the '70s in a time machine and left with the instructions that it should-- in order to avoid influencing the future-- inspire the interest of absolutely no one. Not even Joan Collins could save it.

Ticks (1993) dir. Tony Randel

Logline: The careless leaking of chemical growth enhancers in California's forest region by illegal marijuana growers has mutated the local ticks into oversize, gooey bloodsuckers. These voracious insects will force a group of troubled misfit teens from the city-- who are participating in a wilderness program-- to take their survival expedition a little more seriously.

Animal of Choice: A forest full of ticks, "the vampires of the insect world," pumped up on chemical steroids and thirstier than ever.

Thinking Ecologically: The mutant tick menace has been created by (who else) Clint Howard. His character is an illegal marijuana grower with a hydroponic shack deep in a Californian forest outside of Los Angeles. He's constructed a Rube Goldberg-esque steampunk fertilizer machine that sprays his crops with "chemical enhancements," an herbal steroid that resembles thick green sludge. His machine springs a leak which drips a steady stream of the chemical sludge onto a tick egg sac, encouraging the sickening and unnatural growth of the insects inside. Somehow, the mutated tick eggs then wind up spreading all over the forest (from rocks to trees to cabin closets), presenting a threat for the film's characters in any location.

The main characters, most of whom are teenaged participants in an Inner City Wilderness Project expedition, characterize the forest as a terrible place to be in compared to the relative urban splendor of their Los Angeles home. The project leader's daughter asks of her comrade what others could possibly find to be so inspiring and poetic about the wilderness, and then describes her own impression of it being "suffocating, vile, and full of rot." The film doesn't exactly prove her wrong. Early on, the project leader notes to himself that the teens have been infected with "urban living" and its "every man for himself instinct," making it unlikely for any bonding to take place among them. However, nature does change them: they bond and unite through mutual hatred of the "vile rot" that natures throws at them, resulting in them going so far as to burn most of the forest down in order to destroy the dangers that lurk within. The film's closing shots are gorgeous overhead views of the city (Los Angeles has rarely looked so pretty) as the characters return home to their comfortable urban existences. There's nothing like a death-filled jaunt through the woods to make you appreciate all that you have back in civilization!

Thinking About Animals: With the spread of Lyme disease in recent years, ticks have scuttled their way to the top of many personal Least Liked Insects lists, but concerns over them were clearly less specific in the early 1990s so Ticks primarily plays off the natural ick factor of hard-to-squish bugs that suck your blood. To make them a good deal more threatening, the film increases their size to that of a rat or large toad, grants them the ability to burrow and scurry around under their victims' skin, and makes them more active blood hunters, no longer waiting patiently in tall grass but pursuing over distances and dropping from ceilings. Another added aspect to the mutant tick physiology (though one not explored nearly enough) is that the strengthened neurotoxin that their bite imparts causes hallucinations in their victims. Like in most other Mutant Animal Terror films, playing the mutant card allows the filmmakers to avoid the reality of ticks and create purebred monsters that merely bear the same name. But one of the creepiest moments of tick action is also the most realistic: one of the characters, when attempting to pull a mutant tick off of himself, ends up pulling the body off but leaving the hungry head still latched on with its mandibles' death grip. Sure, the head then proceeds to crawl around under the flesh of this character and eventually (through the aid of oral steroids) emerge from the shell of his body as a even bigger MegaTick, but for a moment the horror was vaguely grounded.

Evaluation in Brief: Though a product of the early '90s, Tony Randel's Ticks is fundamentally similar to its forebears in its general approach to Animal Terror (ecological disaster --> change in animal behavior --> mysterious animal/human deaths --> all out human war against the affected creatures). The most significant differences between Ticks and similar films from the '70s and '80s would be a) its vibrant Nickelodeon color palette, and b) a plethora of slimy, icky, putrid, oozy gore. The film's eponymous creatures are birthed out of leaky, puss-filled egg sacs, and when they bite their victims the disgusting results fall somewhere just shy of the Body Horror realm. Ticks is not complex horror filmmaking, but it entertains and grosses out at precisely the levels it intends to. With Seth Green, Alfonso Ribeiro, Mickey Dolenz's daughter, and the rest of the cast giving likeable performances, the film neglects to kill most of them off and this doesn't bother us, enjoying as we have been their lighthearted bonding through adversity. For a horror film, that's a sign of a certain quality. It was released this past week on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films with a rather vibrant transfer and director commentary. It comes recommended.

Kingdom of the Spiders (1977) dir. John “Bud” Cardos

Logline: When dirt mounds brimming with venomous tarantulas appear on a ranch in the deserts of Arizona, it's only so long before the spiders upgrade their nibbling from calves to human beings. William Shatner, an unlikely veterinarian, fights to beam them back to the hole in ground they came from.

Animal of Choice: Flocks of cohabiting tarantulas who have abandoned their solitary lifestyles in favor of banding together to take down bigger game.

Thinking Ecologically: These films tend to follow a pattern, and in this case we find some definite similarities with the ecological issues in animal terror flicks like The Night of the Lepus (1972) and Deadly Eyes (1982). American farmers' rampant use of DDT on their crops has killed off all of the tarantulas' natural insect prey. In response, the spiders adapt to their new and dire situation by migrating 600 miles to Arizona and altering their independent behavior to communal behavior so that they can colonize and work in conjunction to attain prey previously unavailable to them because of size. By adjusting to the imbalance created by humankind's actions, the spiders establish themselves at the top of the food chain, becoming-- as a unified spider force-- an apex predator, and an unstoppable one at that. The final image of the film reveals that these changes to the arachnid's place in the animal kingdom are permanent and that the Earth will indeed become a sort of kingdom for spiders.

Additionally, the film provides its viewers with the requisite weaselly mayor who makes it clear that he forbids any quarantine of a local ranch that serves as ground zero for the spider epidemic, with its slew of dead calves and a dirt mounds crawling with eight legged terrors. Like his ancestors and descendents, this mayor's denial is fueled by his desire to see the town prosper during its money-making season, in this case a county fair. His lame solution to solving the spider problem is-- naturally-- to spray the spider mounds with pesticides. Silly humans never learn.

Thinking About Animals: For a while into its running time, Kingdom of the Spiders seemed as if it were doing something interesting with its spider antagonists. Though their behavior and methods of attacking prey had changed drastically from the scientific reality, the tarantulas didn't appear to be mutated freaks of nature, as is so often the case in these films. Rather, they seemed to be normal tarantulas that merely adapted to their environment in order to survive. Early on, we see individual spiders in isolation with humans acting naturally: our entomologist heroine interacts with several of them, going so far as to pet and baby talk one as it crawls on her hand, without being attacked. It's only when the spiders join forces that they become hostile threats and are able to take down human-sized prey with massive injections of venom from many fangs. Unfortunately, later on a test result reveals that the spiders' venom is five times more toxic than normal, signalling that these tarantulas are in fact mutated pests. It's a needless and contradictory development in the story of these spiders, allowing them to be viewed as "unnatural" because mutated and thus monstrous.

Evaluation in Brief: Though a competent and entertaining film, Kingdom of the Spiders will be tough to stomach for anyone who detests actual violence done to on-screen animals. More so than any animal terror film I've screened thus far, Cardos's film is happy to harm its non-human actors, squashing hundreds of living tarantulas in its more hectic and ambitious sequences. While this disinterest in the conservation of arachnid life certainly creates some arresting images (I'm thinking primarily of the queasy high angle shot of the town's main road, stained with a few dozen vaguely tarantula-shaped  smudges, as citizens flee in terror), the wanton death it produces feels profoundly not okay. Otherwise, the film is an easy recommendation: the sleazy Shatner charm, bucketfuls of tarantulas, amiably eccentric characters, the gall to have the spiders kill a mother in front of her child, and a cynical, nearly apocalyptic twist ending. If only it were all a little less real.

Deadly Eyes (1982) dir. Robert Clouse

Logline: After chowing down on some hormone-infused corn grain intended for livestock, Tornoto's rat population grow as large as dachshunds and attack the city's humans. It's left up to a basketball coach with lady problems and his new love interest, a non-corrupt health inspector, to fend off the rodent terror.

Animal of Choice: Viscous, human-hungry, steroid-mutated rats as big as small dogs. But literally: dachshunds in rat suits.

Thinking Ecologically: The cause for the oversize rat problem that looms over this fictionalized Toronto is made plain: a city feed lot containing corn grain pumped full of steroids and hormones was poorly managed and monitored by its owners and operators, which encouraged rats to take residence in the lot and sup off the grain, thus causing the rodents to grow to monstrous sizes and develop a voracity with a predilection towards succulent human flesh. The chief health inspector's reluctance to take action against the feed lot (despite his employee's repeated dire reports) because of the mayor's insistence that local businesses avoid scandal is also to blame.

But the film's first few minutes toss in the totality of thoughtless human action as a potential cause for the disaster, too: our continued degradation of the environment, coupled with the rampant pollution of the air and water, has altered the ecological balance of the Earth (especially in metropolitan areas) and both enabled and stimulated growth of the rat population. While it's good that the film is looking at both the micro and macro for areas of human existence on which to place blame, there's a certain fundamental problem in labeling rats as an unambiguous problem to life on Earth (the film tells us that they destroy property and eat 1/5 of all the planet's food) rather than as a necessary component of the world's ecosystems. Thankfully, the bleak downer of an ending reaffirms that the simple elimination of rats (if humans so choose to try) is nigh impossible.

Thinking About Animals: The film's super-rats distinguish themselves early on by killing and eating a cat. Later on-- in case we didn't mind seeing the cat get his-- they then eat a baby. They growl like angry jungle cats and are rarely shown on screen doing anything but gnawing or slurping on dead bodies. The rodent antagonists of Deadly Eyes are presented as pure evil and the fact that it's not even real rats portraying them (but instead dogs in rat suits) removes any lingering sense of reality from them as living creatures, preventing us from attaining even the basic sympathy we have for the abused but deadly rodents in the later Rats - Night of Terror (1984). It's a bit like watching dirty mops scurrying about and biting ankles, with such distance from actual rat behavior allowing the film to so blatantly demonize them.

It's also worth noting that one of the dachshunds on set died, possibly due to suffocation from being trapped inside the rat suit. Though multiple sources attest to the dogs being generally well-treated during production, this is an undeniably unfortunate incident that raises into question the humaneness of employing animals in such a capacity for film. There's always the puppet alternative.

Evaluation in Brief: Director Robert Clouse (Enter the Dragon (1973), The Pack (1977), Gymkata (1985)) fashions one of the most gleefully entertaining animal terror flicks I've seen. Though running under ninety minutes, the film often loses focus and scampers off on charming tangents of content and tone. A good portion of Deadly Eyes concerns itself with hunky teacher Paul (Sam Groom) rebuffing the advances of his flirtatious student (Lisa Langlois) while falling for the more age-appropriate health inspector (Sara Botsford), so one wouldn't be incorrect in mistaking it for a corny romantic comedy with occasional bouts of hyper violence. Curiously, the exploitation elements are full-force, as the film displays no issues with its rat antagonists messily gobbling up both Scatman Crothers and a toddler from his high chair, leaving a trail of baby blood in their wake. The rat terror is delightful, especially in a climatic theater attack (as patrons watch Game of Death (1978), one of Clouse's Bruce Lee films) with the costumed dachshunds looking simultaneously adorable and a little unnerving as they slurp whatever food was used as bait from the actors' faces. A brisk and sketchily conceived Canadian thriller that nonetheless overcomes its many narrative shortcomings with enthusiasm, chutzpah, and general likeability.