Ben (Sam Bottoms) is a gullible college student working at a gas station in the Mojave desert. Horton Madec (Andy Griffith) is a wealthy attorney from Los Angeles who walks with a limp and who fancies himself a big game hunter. Madec hires Ben to serve as his guide through the desert. Madec says that he’s hunting a ram but instead, he ends up shooting and killing an old prospector. Even after Madec offers to pay him off, Ben wants to go to the police. Madec gives it some thought and decides to hunt Ben himself.
After forcing Ben to strip down to his shorts, Madec sets him loose in the desert. As Ben tries to make his way back to civilization, Madec follows close behind and uses his rifle not to kill Ben but instead to keep him from drinking water or taking shelter from the sun.
Savages deserves to better known than it is. The film does a good job of making you feel as if you’re trapped out in the desert with Ben, trying your damndest to survive while some maniac follows close behind, taunting you and refusing to allow you to get any relief. Horton Madec is pure evil, a maniac who brags about how he can do anything he wants because he has money and he knows people. That he’s played by Andy Griffith makes him even more dangerous because you know there’s no way anyone would believe that Andy Griffith took you out to the desert tried to kill you.
After playing the folksy and friendly Andy Taylor for nine seasons on The Andy Griffith Show, Griffith tried to leave Mayberry behind by taking on villainous roles in made-for-TV movies like this one and Pray For The Wildcats. Though he actually started off his film career by playing a villain in A Face In The Crowd, it was still probably a shock for audiences in 1974 to turn on Savages and see Andy Griffith cruelly drinking a martini while another man nearly died of dehydration in front of him. Griffith goes full psycho in the role of Horton Madec and is totally convincing. (Of course, audiences preferred the folksy side of Griffith which is why, even after ten years straight of playing bad guys, Griffith still ended up starring in Matlock.)
Even though it’s Griffith’s show, Sam Bottom does okay in the role of Ben. He has the right look for the character and that’s really all that the part requires. For the majority of the movie, it’s just Griffith and Bottoms but eventually, James Best shows up as Sheriff Bert Williams. Five years later, Best would achieve a certain immortality when he was cast as Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane on The Dukes of Hazzard.
Savages has never gotten an official DVD release but it can be viewed on YouTube, along with Griffith’s other villainous turn from 1974, Pray for the Wildcats.
Horror films took a hiatus from Hollywood from 1937 to 1939. The British Horror Ban forbid monster movies from being screened without an X rating, curtailing the export of terror-inducing tales. The Production Code was in full effect, with Joseph Breen and his censorship minions clamping down on what they considered wasn’t suitable for the public. Lastly, Carl Laemmle Sr. (and his son) were ousted from Universal Studios, the company he founded, with J. Cheever Cowdin taking over as Chairman. Cowdin was a money man with a tight hold on the bottom line for the cash-strapped Universal.
Then in 1938, a Los Angeles theater desperate for business featured a triple-bill consisting of FRANKENSTEIN , DRACULA , and KING KONG , playing to sold-out crowds, and a nationwide rerelease saw similar box-office success. The Universal Monsters were back in business, and a third sequel to their profitable series based on Mary…
Wow, look at all of those creepy kids on the cover of this book!
They really do look like an insufferable pack of brats, don’t they? If nothing else, this cover confirms that children can be creepy, especially when they all go to the same private school and they all have the same grim expression on their face.
First published in 1982, The Children opens with a series of mysterious deaths. The richest man in the world dies on an airplane. His lawyer is killed on another airplane. A network anchorman and his one night stand are gunned down in his apartment, by an 11 year-old. A private investigator is pushed off of a subway platform while a bunch of children watch. There’s something weird about those kids.
The covers describes The Children as being “a novel of terror” but, unfortunately, after a strong opening, it gets bogged down with two characters — glamorous anchorwoman Shelley James and hard-boiled columnist Mark Chandler — investigating the murders and rather inevitably falling in love. I think a part of the problem is that we know that the children are evil before Shelley and Chandler and it takes the two of them so long to figure out what we already know that it’s difficult not to get annoyed with them. In fact, after the initial murders, it’s another 200 pages or so before the book actually returns to the involvement of the children and, even then, the payoff is nowhere as exciting as you may have hoped.
Like 666 and The Rapture, The Children is another book that I ended up reading because I came across it in Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks from Hell. While I can’t really recommend The Children to anyone else, I will definitely recommend that, if you haven’t already read Paperback from Hell, that you order a copy today!
Way back at the end of August, in anticipation of the TSL’s Horrorthon, I went down to my local Half-Price Books and I explored their collection of old horror paperbacks. Among the books that I pulled off the shelf was The Dead Man’s Kiss by Robert Weinberg.
I randomly opened the book and I found myself reading about a woman named Sarah having sex with a resurrected Egypitan sorcerer. I flipped to another part of the book and suddenly, I was reading about a bunch of Neo-Nazis working with a resurrected Egyptian sorcerer to overthrow the U.S. government. I flipped through the book again and suddenly, I was reading about two wisecracking cops discussing how weird it was that they had gone from chasing Neo-Nazis to chasing a resurrected Egyptian sorcerer.
In short, it sounded like a weird book so I bought it and I read it.
And you know what? It is a strange book. Published in 1992, it tells the story of Jambres, a priest in ancient Egypt who was punished for a crime that he didn’t commit. Somehow, this led to his soul being split in half and, now that he’s convinced a bunch of Neo-Nazis to resurrect him, he’s determined to bring the two halves together and then rule the world. Unfortunately, the only way that Jambres can walk around the modern world is by entering someone’s body through their mouth. This may kill the host but it gives Jambres a body and a set of memories to use. The only problem is that the body starts decaying as soon as Jambres enters it, so he and the white supremacists are constantly having to search for a new body for him to inhabit.
While Jambres and the Nazis are wondering around Chicago, they’re being pursued by two unflappable cops. Also on the case is a former MOSSAD agent, who has been assigned to protect the mild-mannered museum worker that Jambres has targeted for death. It all leads to love, of course. Love and death.
The plot of Dead Man’s Kiss has a make-it-up-as-you-go-along feel to it. It’s ludicrous but likable, complete with bizarre dialogue and improbable plot twists. The book may not make too much sense but it does make for an entertaining 250 pages.
Lisa has written in detail how much she enjoys Fulci’s The Beyond. From it’s Lovecraftian themes of otherworldly dangers to Fulci’s stylistic choice of focusing on characters’ eyes and blindness.
Others also love how Fulci is able to combine not just the grand guignol sequences that his films have become famous (or infamous depending on how one judges horror films) with an ethereal look to the visuals that borders the line between being dream-like and nightmarish.
This particular scene doesn’t have that grand guignol panache of Fulci’s more dynamic scenes, but it does give a hint to the desolation and etheric sense one feels seeing that empty causeway with just Liza driving on it then suddenly seeing Emily and her guide dog just standing there at the lane divider.
While I have always had a boyhood crush when it comes to Catriona McColl, I must admit that Cinzia Monreale was quite beautiful in this film even with the weird contacts she wore to show her as having being blinded by what she saw in the beyond.
David Lynch reportedly once described Eraserhead as being a “dream of dark and disturbing things” and the same description can easily be applied to Lucio Fulci’s 1981 masterpiece, The Beyond.
The second part of Fulci’s Beyond trilogy, The Beyond sits between City of the Living Dead and The House By The Cemetery. With its portrayal of naive humans getting an unwanted look at the inexplicable reality that hides just a little beyond ours, it’s a film that very much calls to the mind the work of H.P. Lovecraft. While insanity was often the punishment for gaining knowledge of Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones, the punishment for discovering the Beyond often seems to be blindness.
(Ocular damage was one of Fulci’s trademarks. Starting withZombi 2, almost every Fulci film seemed to feature someone losing an eye. In The Beyond, a plumber played by Giovanni De Nova loses an eye while wandering about a flooded basement and, over the course of the narrative, several character are rendered blind, making them incapable of seeing the true horror of what they’re experiencing. Fulci struggled with diabetes and the threat of blindness runs through almost all of his horror films.)
The Beyond starts with a striking, sepia-toned sequence that’s set in the year 1927. While a young woman named Emily (played Cinzia Monreale) reads from a book, a mob attacks a painter named Schweik. They believe Schweik to be a warlock and they view his grotesque paintings as being proof. (In many ways, the mob is comparable to the critics who insisted on judging Fulci solely based on the subject matter of his films while ignoring the skill with which Fulci directed them.) Schweik is tortured and left crucified in the basement of the Seven Doors Hotel in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Jump forward 54 years. A woman named Liza (Catriona MacColl, who appeared in different roles in all three of the Beyond films) has inherited the long-closed Seven Doors Hotel and she’s moved down to New Orleans to reopen it. Unfortunately, her efforts to renovate the place aren’t going smoothly. It’s been one disaster after another, almost as if someone or something is trying to keep her from reopening the place. The latest was the flooded basement and the plumber who lost both his eye and his life. Of course, Liza would probably be even more concerned if she knew just what exactly it was that attacked the plumber in the first place.
While driving down one of Louisiana’s many bridges to nowhere, Liza is forced to come to a stop when she sees a blind woman and her guide dog standing in front of her car. The woman is Emily, who doesn’t appear to have aged at all since we last saw her. Emily is now blind. She tells Liza that her hotel was once home to an evil warlock and she warns her to stay out Room 36.
Meanwhile, the plumber’s wife and his daughter visit the plumber’s corpse in the morgue. This not only leads to the plumber and several other dead people coming to life but it also leads to an accident with a beaker of acid that was, for some reason, sitting on a desk. Soon, the daughter is blind herself. On the plus side, all of the drama at the hospital does give Liza a chance to meet Dr. John McCabe (played by the always welcome David Warbeck).
Fulci never got much credit for his work with actors. (Some of that, of course, is due to the fact that most of Fulci’s film were atrociously dubbed for overseas release.) However, The Beyond is definitely one of the best-acted of all of his films. In fact, one reason why we stick with the film even when things start to get really, really weird is because we genuinely like Liza and John. Warbeck and MacColl had a lot of chemistry and, in the midst of all the mayhem, they created two very real characters. Cinzia Monreale is also impressive in the role of Emily. Fulci made good use of her other-worldly beauty and Monreale keeps us wondering whether Emily is trying to help of Liza or if she has a secret agenda of her own.
(Towards the end of the film, during a zombie siege, there’s a scene where John and Liza get in an elevator and, as the doors close, Warbeck tries to reload a gun by forcing a bullet down the gun’s barrel. MacColl sees what he’s doing and breaks character, laughing as the doors close. The Italian crew apparently did not realize that Warbeck was playing a joke because this was the take that they used in the film. Needless to say, it temporarily takes you out of the film and yet it’s such a charming moment that you can’t help but love it. It’s nice to see that with all the grotesque insanity going on around them, Warbeck and MacColl were having fun.)
The Beyond gets progressively more bizarre as it continues. It doesn’t take long for Fulci to abandon any pretense of traditional narrative and the film soon becomes a collection of vaguely connected, increasingly surreal set pieces. A man goes to a library and ends up getting eaten by an army of spiders. Ghouls suddenly roam through the hallways of the hospital. Yet another person loses an eye, this time to a loose nail. Another relatively minor character suddenly has a hole in her head. A chase through the hospital’s basement leads to the characters somehow finding themselves back in the hotel. And finally, we go to the Beyond….
This is going to be heresy to some but, as much as I appreciate it, The Beyond is actually not my favorite Fulci film. Overall, Zombi 2 is my favorite and, as far as the trilogy goes, I actually prefer The House By The Cemetery. That said, The Beyond is the film that best exemplifies Fulci’s cinematic philosophy. Fulci called it pure cinema, the idea that if your visuals are strong and properly edited together, the audience will use them to supply their own narrative. That’s certainly the case in The Beyond. A lot happens in The Beyond and it’s not always clear how everything’s related. But since every scene is full of Fulci’s trademark style, the viewers builds the necessary connections in their own mind. The end result is a film that, perhaps more than any other Fulci film, capture the feel of having a dream. It’s not a film that will be appreciated by everyone. Fulci’s work rarely is. Still, for fans of Italian horror, The Beyond is one of the key films.
Fulci followed The Beyond with one of his best-known movies, The House By The Cemetery. I’ll look at that film tomorrow.
In New York City, a group of people sit around a table, holding a seance. One of them, a woman named Mary (Catriona MacColl) has a vision. She sees a sickly, hollow-cheeked priest walking through a cemetery. She watches as he hangs himself and, as the priest dangles from a tree branch, Mary lets out a piercing scream and collapses to the floor. The police are called and they promptly declare that Mary has died. Later, while a hard-boiled reporter named Peter Bell (Christopher George) watches as two grave-diggers walk away from her half-buried coffin, he hears something coming from the grave. From insider her coffin, Mary is screaming and struggling to get out!
Peter grabs a pickax and smashes it down into the coffin. Peter may be trying to free her but what he doesn’t realize is that, with each blow of the pickax, he comes dangerously close to hitting Mary in the face. Somehow, Peter manages to avoid killing Mary. Once he gets her out of the coffin, Peter and Mary go and see a medium to try to figure out the meaning behind Mary’s previous vision.
What they don’t discuss is why or, for that matter, how everyone was convinced that Mary was dead for at least a day or two. Mary doesn’t mention that Peter nearly killed her with the pickax. In fact, for two people who have just met under the strangest and most disturbing of circumstances, Peter and Mary seem to be getting along famously. For that matter, they don’t appear to be too surprised when the medium informs them Mary’s vision indicated that the dead will soon be entering the world of the living.
And so begins Lucio Fulci’s wonderfully odd and surreal City of the Living Dead. Reading the paragraphs above, you might think that I was criticizing City of the Living Dead but nothing could be further from the truth. From the start, Fulci establishes that City of the Living Dead is going to fully embrace its own unique aesthetic.
The majority of City of the Living Dead takes place in a small town with the name of Dunwich, a name that immediately (and, I believe, intentionally) brings to mind the writing of H.P. Lovecraft. Dunwich is a town that always seems to be covered in fog. At the local bar, men talk about the recent suicide of Father Thomas and they discuss what to do about Bob (Giovanni Lombardo Radice), who the majority of them believe to be a a pervert. Meanwhile, Bob comes across an inflatable sex doll in a deserted warehouse and, for the most part, just tries to stay out of everyone’s way.
Even without the presence of the living dead, Dunwich doesn’t seem like the ideal place to live. A greedy morgue attendant attempts to steal a dead woman’s jewelry. A psychiatrist named Gerry (Carlo de Mejo) struggles to calm the nerves of his patient, Sandra (Janet Agren). At one point, one man gets so angry with another that he drills a hole in his head. That’s Dunwich, for you. Who needs the dead when you’re surrounded by the worst of the living?
Speaking of the dead, that dead priest is still wandering around town. When he comes across two teenagers making out in a jeep, he rips open the boy’s head while the girl bleeds from her eyes and proceeds to vomit up her intestines. (Somewhat inevitably, the boy is played by Michele Soavi who, before launching his own acclaimed directing career, always seemed to die in films like this. Even more inevitably, the girl is played Daniela Doria, who appeared in four Fulci films and suffered a terrible fate in every single one of them.)
By the time that Peter and Mary actually reach the town, the dead are already moving through the fog while storms of maggots crash through windows. Even the sight of a seemingly innocent child running towards the camera leads to the sound of people screaming off-screen….
Even though it’s actually one of Fulci’s more straight-forward films (i.e., a character says that Dunwich is going to be overrun by zombies and then Dunwich actually is overrun by zombies), it still plays out like a particularly intense dream. From the fog-shrouded visuals to the often odd dialogue, City of the Living Dead is a film that plays out according to its own unique logic. The film’s surreal atmosphere may have partially been the result of a rushed production schedule but it also serves to suggest that, as a result of the priest’s suicide, the nature of reality itself has changed.
City of the Living Dead is not a film for everyone. If I was introducing someone to Fulci for the first time, I would probably have them watch Zombi 2, The Black Cat andLizard In A Woman’s Skin long before I even suggested they take a look at City of the Living Dead. That City of the Living Dead is a gory film should come as no surprise. That was one of Fulci’s trademarks, after all. Instead, what makes City of the Living Dead a difficult viewing experience for some is just how bleak the film truly is. Even before the living dead arrive, Dunwich is a town the seems to epitomize the worst instincts of humanity. There’s a darkness at the heart of the City of the Living Dead and it has nothing to do with zombies.
First released in 1980, City of the Living Dead is generally considered to be the first part of Fulci’s Beyond trilogy. Catriona MacColl, who gives such a good performance here, appeared in the film’s two follow-ups, The Beyond and The House By The Cemetery. (MacColl played a different character in each film.) With each film, Fulci’s vision grew more and more surreal until eventually, he seemed fully prepared to reject the idea of narrative coherence all together.
Though initially dismissed by critics, The Beyond trilogy is today celebrated as one of the greatest achievements in the history of Italian horror. City of the Living Dead is probably the most narratively coherent film in the trilogy, even if its ending raises more questions than it answers. Personally, I love the ending of City of the Living Dead, even though it was apparently a last-minute decision. (According to Wikipedia — so take this with a grain of salt — someone spilled coffee on the original work print of the ending, which led to Fulci having to improvise.) It’s an ending that suggests that not only has the film broken apart but that the world is shattering right along with it. In the end, the world falls apart not with a bang but with one long scream.
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking.
Many great horror films have taken place in a college setting. Then again, so have many, many bad ones. In honor of all of those films, here are….
4 Shots From 4 Collegiate Slasher Films
Final Exam (1981, dir by Jimmy Huston)
The Dorm That Dripped Blood (1982, dir by Stephen Carpenter and Jeffrey Obrow)
Pieces (1983, dir by J. Piquer Simon)
The House on Sorority Row (1983, dir by Mark Rosman)
Creeped Out is a Netflix release that really isn’t. I have noticed that Netflix will call something an original series even though they just bought the rights. This show was originally produced by CBBC, explaining why the second episode has very hard to understand British accents. I checked Bruce McDonald’s IMDB and yes…he’s english and wrote for the Eastenders. Eastenders or EastEnders (sp?) is show that I believe is about poor people in London or something…I’m not investigating anymore than that.
I watched the first episode Marti with my girls (7,9). They were quite scared by the opening and one other scene that I will get to later. The show is a lot like the 90s show The Outer Limits. It has a lot of spooky and technology themes that teach a morality or cautionary tale. I was primed to like this show because I loved the Outer Limits and one of the writers is really nice: Melinda Snodgrass (follow her on twitter).
The story opens with Kim. Kim is a pretty girl in high school who none of the boys pay attention to because that actually happens in real life. She has nerdy friend that also is a pariah for no particular reason. Kim is forced to hang out with her loser friend and pine for a boy who looks like Justin Bieber. She gets a new phone and pays for it somehow. This phone is indestructible and self-aware.
The phone’s AI calls himself Marti. Marti is really really creepy. He works autonomously to make Kim popular and succeeds. Kim gets the attention of the cool kids, including Bieber. Just when Bieber is about to go out with her, in true Lifetime MOW fashion, Marti reveals himself to be a jealous psycho boyfriend. He threatens to destroy Kim’s new found popularity unless she agrees to be only his. YIKES. When Kim gets fed up, she tries to destroy the phone, it doesn’t work. Kim tries to call customer service and a woman answer who slowly takes Marti’s side. Then, the voice switched to Marti’s voice and my daughters both screamed. They didn’t understand why fully it was so scary, but I finished the show alone.
Marti blackmails Kim to take him to the prom and she agrees. It’s really creepy. She eventually defeats Marti, but he destroys her popularity. She entombs Marti in cement, but then considers releasing him six months later because she really liked being popular.
The show had a real Outer Limits vibe and played upon human weakness and need to be loved. There’s always been the morality tale of giving up your soul for fame, but this is more basic. Kim wants to be loved and our technology has never made us more isolated from real love. Marti’s popularity is twitter popularity: fake. Marti gave her multiple friendships that were ended as quickly as they began like muting or blocking someone. On the other hand, Kim’s nerdy friend took the good with the bad and continued to love Kim. It spoke to dependence and isolation because of technology and our total dependence upon instant love.
You’re a college student. You’re a member of a sorority. You start your day by waking up in a stranger’s bed, with a hangover. When you walk across campus, you blow off the girl trying to get you to sign her anti-climate change petition. When you get back to your sorority house, you’re rude to her roommate and refuse to eat the birthday cupcake that she made for you. You body shame a girl at lunch. You’re sleeping with one of your professors. You’re rude to your father. You’re going to a party.
Oh! And did I mention that you’re in a slasher film and that there’s a really creepy figure wearing a baby mask who is following you around?
Seriously, you are so dead.
That’s the situation that Theresa “Tree” Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) finds herself in 2017’s Happy Death Day. It’s her birthday and, unfortunately, she’s murdered at the end of it. Of course, if you’ve ever seen in a slasher film, it’s not a shock when Tree dies. She’s the quintessential self-centered girl who always gets killed in these type of movies.
(For the record, I would probably die within the first ten minutes of any slasher film.)
However, in Tree’s case, she gets another chance. And then another one after that. And then, another one after that… every night, Tree dies. Every morning, Tree wakes up in the dorm room of Carter Davis (Israel Broussard) and she has to relive the last day of her life all over again.
To the film’s credit, it doesn’t take long for Tree to realize that she’s in a time loop. (Also, to the film’s credit, Carter specifically points out that Tree’s story sounds exactly like the plot of Groundhog Day. “What’s that?” Tree asks. Carter explains that it’s a film with Bill Murray. “Who’s Bill Murray?” Tree replies.) Once Tree figures out that she’s going to have to keep living the same day over and over again, she sets out trying not to die. She doesn’t go to the party but that just means that the killer comes to her. She tries to spend a day barricaded in her dorm room, just to find that the killer is hiding in a corner. She follows the various suspects around as they go about their day. It seems like no matter what she does, she can’t keep the killer from catching her.
On the plus side, as a result of having to deal with the same crap over and over again, she does become a better person. She’s less rude and condescending. She grows more confident in herself and stops worrying so much about what everyone else is going to think about her. Of course, becoming a better person isn’t going to do her much good if she keeps dying every night….
Happy Death Day is a clever combination of horror and comedy. It’s a movie that’s smart enough not take itself too seriously. Even when Tree becomes a nicer person, both the character and the film retain their sarcastic edge. Even when she learns to face the world with positivity and happiness, the film seems to be gently mocking the ease by which film characters can go from being self-centered to thoroughly altruistic. Meanwhile, the killer may be frightening but again, the film mines plenty of dark humor from the character’s pure determination. No matter Tree does, that killer eventually shows up.
It’s a precarious balancing act, trying to be scary and funny at the same time. Fortunately, Happy Death Day benefits from a clever script and a good lead performance from Jessica Rothe. Rothe gives an intelligent and empathetic performance as Tree. It’s impossible not to sympathize with her frustration as she wakes up to discover that she has to go through the exact same day yet again. It’s a sign of the strength of Rothe’s performance that you sympathize with Tree even before she becomes a nicer person.
Happy Death Day is a clever film and one that I’m surprised to say I missed when it was originally released. If you also missed it, now’s a great time to catch it!
Ben (Sam Bottoms) is a gullible college student working at a gas station in the Mojave desert. Horton Madec (Andy Griffith) is a wealthy attorney from Los Angeles who walks with a limp and who fancies himself a big game hunter. Madec hires Ben to serve as his guide through the desert. Madec says that he’s hunting a ram but instead, he ends up shooting and killing an old prospector. Even after Madec offers to pay him off, Ben wants to go to the police. Madec gives it some thought and decides to hunt Ben himself.
Through the Shattered Lens 