Step Right Up

Film: The Funhouse
Format: Internet video on Fire!

Like any genre, horror movies have evolved over time. One of the ways in which they have evolved is in how the protagonists encounter and deal with the danger. These days, most of our protagonists are pulled into something through accident, bad luck, or a poor but understandable decision. We don’t fault the couple in The Strangers for being home, for instance. Early horror films, though, especially those of the 1970s and ‘80s, feature teens who make really stupid decisions and essentially set themselves up as a buffet for the killer. Such is the case with 1981’s The Funhouse, a film where it genuinely feels like our endangered teens don’t really deserve to remain in the gene pool.

As the name of this film implies, we’re going to be spending some time with a carnival, and a lot of that time is clearly going to be spent in the carnival’s funhouse. This is because of a monumentally stupid decision made by our endangered teens, one of whom is the cause of all o the problems that happen to them. Seriously, if you have a friend like this guy, you should rethink the relationship.

Ten Days of Terror!: Eaten Alive

Film: Eaten Alive
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Certain directors do certain things really well. Hitchcock did suspense like no one else, and early Spielberg is rife with absent fathers. In the horror world, backwoods psychopaths come in a lot of flavors, and you have to give some credit to directors like Wes Craven for films like The Hills Have Eyes. But no one really does true hillbilly psychopathy like Tobe Hooper did. Don’t get me wrong; Craven wrote and directed a good psycho, but there’s a real touch of nastiness to Hooper’s work. You can see it in a film like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where it genuinely feels like he found a family of inbred mutants. Eaten Alive has the same feeling. There’s something about this film that feels legitimately dangerous, like we’re seeing people who aren’t acting.

Eaten Alive is not long on plot, but it doesn’t really need to be. It’s not the sort of movie that trades on its plot in general. It trades specifically on the idea of the audience wanting to see people get eaten by a crocodile. We’re going to ignore the fact that this takes place in Texas so it should be an alligator. To the person being dined upon, that difference is going to be pretty low on the list of concerns.

Send Nudes!

Films: Lifeforce
Format: Streaming video from Pluto TV on Fire!

Stop me if you’ve heard this plot before. A group of human space travelers find an alien spacecraft that appears to be filled with the bodies of dead alien life forms. It turns out that the alien creatures aren’t as dead as believed, and they wake up and start feeding on the humans, frequently by literally hiding inside of them. Sounds a bit like Alien, no? Well, in this case, it’s Lifeforce, and while this was based on a book called “The Space Vampires,” the screenplay was written in part by Dan O’Bannon, who wrote Alien.

Lifeforce, while vastly different from Alien, has a great deal in common with it. It’s also got a lot of things that Alien doesn’t have. Primarily, it has Mathilda May, who spends the vast majority of her seven or so minutes of screen time completely nude. Frequent readers of this blog will note that I’m not a gorehound when it comes to horror movies. I’m similarly not a sexhound. It’s hard not comment on it because it often seems like the entire point of the film.

Autopsies

Film: Body Bags
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on the new internet machine.

Ah, the anthology film, that most horror-centric of subgenres that isn’t quite exclusive to the genre. After all, there have been comedy anthology films and a Western anthology or two, but nothing screams low-budget horror movie like a bunch of unrelated short films loosely connected by a framing story. That’s exactly what we’

re getting with Body Bags, made for television, albeit it made for Showtime.

The word is, evidently, that Showtime wanted a serial to compete with Tales from the Crypt. Body Bags was that attempt, and it was scuttled before it really got started. The three filmed segments were put together with a cobbled framing story, and this was the result. There’s a great deal in Body Bags that is a lot of fun and works really well. The first is that it is absolutely loaded with cameos. The second is that the shorts here aren’t five or even 15 minutes long. They’re all closer to half an hour, giving them a good amount of room to really tell the story without diving head-first into jump scares and gore.

Wednesday Horror: Salem's Lot

Film: Salem’s Lot
Format: IFC on rockin’ flatscreen.

One of the reasons I enjoy horror movies is that I find them to be similar to roller coasters. They’re a huge adrenaline rushes. I am occasionally scared in the moment, but rarely for long, partly because I don’t have a belief in the supernatural. It’s rare that I find something truly scary, but the (surprise surprise) made-for-TV version of Salem’s Lot from 1979 qualifies. The truth is that I probably saw this when I was too young, so it’s one of those things that hits me on a more visceral level. It’s honestly probably not as frightening as I’m saying it is, but it’s something that always strikes me as being genuinely scary.

Here’s the thing: I don’t know why it works as well as it does. Certainly there are parts of it that I can say work really well for specific reasons. There are a couple of great jump scares and a few moments of building tension that work nearly perfectly, but as far as why the whole three-hour experience works as well as it does, I’m not sure. In a lot of ways, it shouldn’t. It almost seems like a joke to have this staring David Soul, most famous for playing Hutch on “Starsky and Hutch.” And yet it works. When I went through the They Shoot Zombies list, I was incredibly pleased to not just see this on the list, but to see it in the top-200 where it belongs.

Happy Halloween!

Film: Spoorloos (The Vanishing); The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on laptop (Spoorloos); DVD from personal collection on kick-ass portable DVD player (Chainsaw).

Since it’s Halloween, I thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to watch a couple of films that I was pretty damn sure would scare me. I like horror movies in general. More accurately, I like smart horror movies, ones that don’t play to the lowest common denominator. Stupid horror movies don’t really do anything for me. I’m not scared when I know what’s going to happen, or when the victim in the film is dumb enough to walk into something obvious. So the films of today are interesting in the sense that in both cases, I know where the film is going. I’ve had access to both films for months. But I haven’t watched them because where they go freaks me out a bit (or a lot).

Spoorloos (The Vanishing) is the first of these. I admit right now that I am something of a claustrophobe. I don’t mind small places like elevators, but I have an intense fear of being physically confined or restrained. That comes into play in Spoorloos, and I knew that going in. What I dreaded more than anything was that ending I knew was coming. What I didn’t understand was how what was essentially a simple story could be expanded into something that lasted close to two hours.

The Best Month Ever: June, 1982 Part 1

Films: Poltergeist; The Thing
Format: DVDs from personal collection on big ol’ television.

[These reviews have been included as a part of Pussy Goes Grrr's Juxtaposition Blogathon!]

Once upon a time, movie studios didn’t hold their best films until the last couple of weeks of December as Oscar bait. In those days, before the maniacal push for the Oscar, perhaps the greatest month of movies ever was June, 1982. Oh, there are better years for movies, certainly. Both 1967 and 1988 have more than 20 films on The List, but I stand by June of ’82 as the single greatest month. In rapid succession, releases included Poltergeist, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Blade Runner, and The Thing. Additionally, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan came out this month, and I hold that it should be on the list as the best example of one of America’s greatest cultural exports.

Is it possible there’s another great month out there? Sure, and if I did a little research, I could probably find one just as good or better. But why bother? This one holds a special place for me. I saw four of those movies (all but Blade Runner--I was too young to care about it) in the theater and remember each one vividly.


Of the four, Poltergeist was the first to be released. Allegedly filmed by Tobe Hooper, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that Spielberg, who wrote the story and produced, had a heavy hand in the direction. It looks like a Spielberg film, honestly. There’s a natural progression in terms of lighting, shot, and effects from films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Raiders of the Lost Ark to this one to make a pretty solid connection.

This is the story of the Freeling family: Steven (Craig T. Nelson), Diane (JoBeth Williams), and kids Dana (Dominique Dunne), Robbie (Oliver Robins), and Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke). They live in a fairly standard suburban home, in a newish subdivision. Steven works for the developer selling houses while Diane manages the house and the kids. All is well until one day Carol Anne starts talking back to the static on the television. A few nights later, during a thunderstorm, she speaks to the television again, and some ectoplasmic stuff comes out, burns a hole in the wall of a room, and we get the iconic line, “They’re here!”

These are what Carol Anne calls “The TV people,” and they start causing mischief around the house. During another storm, a tree breaks through the window in Robbie’s and Carol Anne’s room, pulling Robbie into the yard. While the tree appears to be attempting to eat him, Steven pulls him out, and the tree is carried away by a tornado. As all this is happening, Carol Anne is sucked into the closet and what appears to be a parallel dimension in which she can only talk to the people in the house through the television set.

The image of the little girl looking over her shoulder from the static-covered TV is only one of the iconic moments from this film. The other is Zelda Rubenstein, who plays the medium Tangina. A squat little woman, she is on camera only for a few minutes, but her presence in the film is huge, and one of the most memorable things from the film.

There’s also a sense of humor at work here. When a trio of paranormal investigators come to look at the house and to help find Carol Anne, one (Richard Lawson) talks about an event he filmed in which a child’s toy moved a distance of seven feet in seven hours. Steven, unimpressed, opens the room that belonged to Carol Anne, displaying a tableau of moving furniture and flying toys. Another investigator (Martin Casella) has a terrifying moment in the family bathroom. Later, the leader of the team (Beatrice Straight) tells the family that she and the first investigator will be back. The other will not be returning. Earlier in the film, the parents lay in bed smoking pot while Steven, evidently high as a kite, reads a biography of Ronald Reagan. That’s subtle, and funny.

For a PG movie, Poltergeist is terrifying. At one point, when we learn exactly what is going on in the Freeling’s house, Diane is trapped in the unfinished swimming pool. She climbs most of the way out and then slides back in in what is one of the great moments in film in the 1980s. I saw this with friends when it was released. The night I saw Poltergeist, it rained terribly. I had trees outside my bedroom window; I slept in another room.

There are too many great moments in this film to recount. It stands as one of the greatest films of its genre and its decade. Much of it, the iconic lines (“This house is clean.” and “Cross into the light!” resonate as much as “They’re here!”), the ultimate reason for the disturbances, and many of the shots and scenes have woven themselves into American and perhaps world culture. There’s a reason films like this one still get talked about.


My original plan was to watch E.T. as well, but of these four movies, this is the one I don’t have in my collection. It also happens to be my least favorite of the four. So we adapt and adjust. The Thing and Blade Runner were released on the same day in 1982. Of the two, it’s hard to pick a favorite, but I prefer The Thing. It has nothing to do with the direction, or the story, or the mise-en-scene. It has everything to do with the situation in which I saw the film for the first time.

I was 14, and my parents were gone for the weekend. My brother and sister were supposed to look after me, and while I was certainly old enough to spend a few hours by myself, they weren’t supposed to leave me in the house by myself at night. It happened to be June 26th, which was the day after opening night for The Thing. My brother and sister were dedicated splatter film fans, and desperately wanted to see this. Rather than draw straws to see who had to stay home, they took me, acting as my legal guardians for the night.

While certainly not the first scary movie I’d seen in the theater (Jaws and Poltergeist came first), it was the first time I saw one in the company of my siblings. I was a relatively squeamish 14-year-old, but I gutted this one out. Because of that—because I didn’t cry or hide my face or leave the theater, for that night I got treated like one of the big kids. It’s been one of the many reasons I have loved horror movies ever since.

This is a remake, and it’s far superior to The Thing from Another World from the ‘50s. Our action takes place in a research station in the Antarctic. When some people from a Norwegian station nearby appear to go berserk, the Americans investigate, and find everyone dead. They also find evidence that the Norwegians located something horrible below the ice. Taking back what looks like a mass of melted flesh, the Americans soon discover that the Norwegians did indeed find something, and that something is alive and dangerous.

The critter is a shapeshifter, and essentially each cell of its body is a separate entity. It invades a host, gestates, then splits apart in a spray of gore. After a little while, it coalesces into the shape of its original host—it looks the same and sounds the same, but it is now an alien creature bent on occupying other creatures and propagating itself across the world.

This is a tense film, and for this reason is one of Carpenter’s best. Once it becomes evident exactly what is going on, everything devolves into paranoia. No one can be trusted, and anyone could be an alien menace looking to get someone else alone for a couple of minutes to enact a changeover. It has a lot of similarities to Invasion of the Body Snatchers in that respect.

Two things sell this film. First are the special effects. In 1982, this was as gruesome as a film got, rivaling such splatterfests as Dawn of the Dead for pure, gratuitous entrails. In one scene, for instance, a man’s chest opens up and forms jaws, biting off another man’s hands. When the creature is attacked with fire, the head splits off from the rest of the body, sprouts legs and antennae, and skitters away. It’s completely obscene and completely brilliant. Sadly, the effects aren’t as tremendous 30 years later, but they still work to an extent.

Second, the cast is fantastic. Heading things up is Kurt Russell as R.J. MacReady, the helicopter pilot, and one of the few men who appears to be thinking. His friend and foil is Childs (the always underrated Keith David), whose self-preservationist paranoia is tinged with just enough menace to make him either a huge son of a bitch or one of the creatures from the very start. Wilford Brimley plays Blair, who quickly loses his shit, making Childs’s paranoia look like minor dyspepsia. Running the crew is Gary (James Cromwell lookalike Donald Moffat), who deals as well as he can with the world shattering around him and each man looking out for his own skin…or to get into the skins of the others. Rounding out the cast are the medical doctor, Copper (Richard Dysart); the dog handler, Clark (Richard Masur); the cook, Nauls (T.K. Carter), radioman Windows (Thomas G. Waites); stoner-grunt Palmer (David Clennon); and scientists Norris (Charles Hallahan), Fuchs (Joel Polis), and Bennings (Peter Maloney).

What really makes me the happiest about this film, though, is that the characters often do things that turn out to be huge mistakes, but they do them for the right reasons. Over and over again, they make decisions that look smart until they play out to their logical conclusion and prove to be terrible errors. I love that, because the characters act in a way that, on a first view, I’d like to think I would. And then I discover that, like them, I’d be alien fodder because of it.

I love this film, and bought in on DVD mainly because I wore out my VHS copy a few years ago. Few other films (Invasion of the Body Snatchers being one) create such an intense atmosphere of panic, paranoia, and fear. This is great stuff, and if the effects don’t hold up, every other aspect of the film does.

Why to watch Poltergeist: Proof that PG movies can scare the snot out of you.
Why not to watch: Nightmares.

Why to watch The Thing: It’s hardcore.
Why not to watch: The effects don’t hold up as well as you might like.