First released in 1970, The Cross and the Switchblade stars Pat Boone as David Wilkerson.
David is a small-town preacher who heads to Brooklyn in the late 50s. Having read an article about the prevalence of violent gangs in New York City, David is determined to make a difference and bring some peace to the city. Why exactly he feels that he can do that, as opposed to someone who is actually from New York and who has some actual experience dealing with gangs, is never really explained. David starts going to drug dens and back alleys and rooftops in the poorest parts of the city. At first, no one takes him seriously but, because he refuses to give up, he does slowly start to win the neighborhood’s respect. He’s even given a place to live so that he’ll no longer have to spend his time sleeping in his car.
(Sleeping in his car? David really didn’t think this out before heading up to New York, did he?)
David becomes obsessed with trying to reach Nicky Cruz (a young Erik Estrada), who is one of the most fearsome member of the Mau Maus gang. The problem is that Nicky really doesn’t want to be reached. He’s been betrayed too many times by the system to trust anyone who claims that they want to help. Nicky is a lot like the character that Michael Wright played in The Principal, basically threatening to cut off any helping hand this offered to him. When one of Nicky’s girlfriends begs for a fix of heroin, Nicky instead sends her to the local church with orders to “take care of” David. When she instead accepts David’s offer of help and gets sober, Nicky becomes even angrier….
The Cross and the Switchblade is an early example of the type of “mainstream” religious film that, as of late, has become popular in America. It may be about religion but it also has a lengthy fight scene and some mild cursing, as if the film wanted to make sure that everyone watching knew that it was a “real movie” as opposed to just being a religious tract. The film was shot on location in Brooklyn, which does bring an authentically gritty feel to certain parts of the film.
Unfortunately, the film itself is done in by a slow pace and a few odd casting choices. One would think that a young Pat Boone would be a good choice for a fresh-faced preacher from Middle America but, instead, Boone gives a rather stiff performance as David Wilkerson and certainly shows none of the charisma that would be necessary to get the film’s gangs to even momentarily put down their weapons and listen to a sermon. If Boone doesn’t show enough emotion, Estrada shows a bit too much. The film was Estrada’s acting debut but, even at the age of 21, Estrada had already developed the Shatneresque acting style that makes him so entertaining in films like Gunsand Chupacabra Vs. The Alamobut less credible in films where he actually has to play characters who go through a change or learn a lesson.
In the end, perhaps the most interesting thing about this film is that it was directed by Don Murray, the actor who was nominated for an Oscar for Bus Stop and who played the doomed senator in Advice and Consent. Three years after Cross and the Switchblade, Murray would make quite an impression as the evil Governor Breck in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. More recently, he played Dougie’s surprisingly sympathetic boss in Twin Peaks: The Return. Murray is a great, albeit underrated actor. But, as a director (or at least as the director of this particular film), he struggled to keep the action moving and far too often, he used gimmicks like slow motion and weird camera angles in an attempt to liven up the story.
The Cross and the Switchblade asks the viewer to choose one or the other. Ultimately, it doesn’t make a compelling case for either.
Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sunday, I will be reviewing the Canadian series, Degrassi Junior High, which aired on CBC and PBS from 1987 to 1989! The series can be streamed on YouTube!
As much as I love Degrassi, I have to admit that I’ve never really sat down and watched the two shows that launched the entire franchise, Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High. I figured why not give it a shot now?
Episode 1.1 “Kiss Me, Steph”
(Dir by Kit Hood, originally aired on January 18th, 1987)
Welcome to Toronto! It’s time for a new school year at Degrassi Junior High!
As I watched the first episode of Degrassi Junior High, the first thing I noticed was just how grainy and depressing everything looked. As opposed to the bright lighting and vibrant colors of Degrassi: The Next Generation, the world of Degrassi Junior High looked overcast and not always inviting. The school itself looked old, as if it had been a while since anyone bothered to paint the walls or even sweep the floors. In short, visually, Degrassi Junior High looked pretty much like a real middle school. The overcast imagery neatly mirrored the way that most people feel when they’re starting the first day of school, especially if it’s a new school.
It’s the first day of school for Arthur Kobalewscuy (Duncan Waugh) and, being short and way too trusting for his own, it doesn’t take long before the school prankster, Joey Jeremiah (Pat Mastroianni), tricks him into getting locked into the janitor’s closet. Poor Arthur but, far more importantly …. JOEY! As any true fan of Degrassi knows, Joey would go on to become one of the most important parts the franchise, both in the original series and a good deal of The Next Generation as well. In the first episode, he’s far a cry from the likable Joey that we all know. Instead, he’s just an obnoxious kid who wears a fedora to school.
Arthur is the younger brother of Stephanie Kaye (Nicole Stoffman), who is the most popular girl in the school. One would think that this would be a good thing for Arthur but Stephanie begins the school day by ordering Arthur not to talk to her because she’s in “grade 8” and he’s only in “grade 7.” Stephanie and Arthur’s parents are divorced, with Stephanie living with her mother and Arthur living with her father. Stephanie is determined to have a new image for Grade 8 and, as soon as she steps into the school, she heads to the bathroom and takes off her boring white blouse and blue skirt to reveal the crop top and tight jeans that she’s wearing underneath. Her best friend, the somewhat dour Voula (Niki Kemey), watches in horror as Stephanie puts on makeup. (I usually waited until I arrived at school to do my makeup as well.)
When Stephanie hears an announcement that student council elections are coming up, she decides to run for President. Voula is happy to serve as Stephanie’s campaign manager until Stephanie starts exchanging kisses for votes. Voula is scandalized that Stephanie isn’t talking about the issues and is running with the slogan, “All The Way With Stephanie Kaye.” Voula warns Stephanie that none of the girls are going to vote for her but Stephanie explains that she only needs the votes of the boys. Of course, the main reason why Voula is upset is because Stephanie is giving all the credit for her successful campaign to Joey instead of her.
(Interestingly enough, one of the first episodes of Degrassi: The Next Generation also featured a student council election and a sister trying to ignore her dorky younger brother.)
While Stephanie is winning over the boys, Arthur finally manages to get a new friend named Yick Yu (Siluck Saysanasy). Yay, everyone needs a friend!
Stephanie wins the election. The announcement is made while Stephanie is in home room where her teacher is none other than Mr. Raditch (Dan Woods), who would later be the first of many principals on Degrassi: The Next Generation. Joey jumps up and hugs Stephanie as the announcement is made. “Mr. Jeremiah!” Mr. Raditch snaps, “Not in my class! Save that behavior for the polls!”
(Fortunately, Mr. Raditch would warm up to Joey by the time that Joey’s stepson was enrolled in the school. But that’s not going to happen for a while….)
Having won the election, Stephanie discovers that she’s actually expected to do a lot of stuff, like give a speech to the PTA. Stephanie begs Voula to write the speech for her but Voula tells Stephanie that she doesn’t want to be her friend anymore. “You’re on your own, Ms. President! You and your new image!”
Oh well. With great power comes great responsibility and all that stuff. Personally, I think Stephanie should just blow off the speech. And really, Voula is being a bit too self-righteous here. I mean, it’s student council. It means nothing! The episode ends with Stephanie swearing that she’s going to be the best president that the school has ever had but it shouldn’t be that difficult since it’s not like the president makes school policy or anything. As Stephanie, once again dressed modestly, leaves the school, she finally acknowledges Arthur as her brother and Arthur offers to write the speech for her.
This was not a bad way to start the franchise and I enjoyed spotting future Degrassi stars like Wheels, Snake, and Spike wandering around the school. This episode did a good job of capturing the silliness of student council elections and also the way every day of high school and middle school can feel like the biggest drama ever. Arthur and Yick are likable in their nerdy way. I related Stephanie. Voula kind of needs to get over herself but we all had a friend like that in school, didn’t we?
Episode 1.2 “The Big Dance”
(Dir by Kit Hood, originally aired on January 25th, 1987)
It’s time for the fall dance!
Voula, who is still unreasonably angry with Stephanie, suggests that they use the dance as a way to raise money for the foster child that the school is sponsoring. Everyone thinks this is a great idea and they think Voula should give a speech while handing over the money at the end of the dance. Unfortunately, Voula’s superprotective father (Paul Brock) refuses to allow Voula to stay out past 9:30. He also freaks out when he sees that Voula is wearing lipstick and suddenly, it makes more sense why she’s so jealous of Stephanie.
As for Stephanie, she asks Wheels (Neil Hope) to take her to dance and — OH MY GOD, IT’S WHEELS! Now, as anyone who knows anything about Degrassi can tell you, Wheels eventually became one of the most important characters on the show. As soon as I saw Joey talking to him, I immediately started to think about the fact that this is the same Wheels who is going eventually lose his parents to a drunk driver, get molested while hitchhiking, develop a drinking problem, and end up going to prison shortly after graduating high school. In this episode, though, he’s just a pleasant-natured friend of Joey’s.
Voula lies to her father about spending the night with a study group and instead, heads to the dance. Meanwhile, Stephanie goes to the house of her friend Lucy Fernandez (Anais Granofsky) so she can change into her school dance clothes. (Fans of Degrassi know that Lucy is destined to end up getting temporarily blinded and crippled as a result of Wheels driving drunk.) Along with the two creepy twins, Heather and Erica (Maureen and Angela Deiseach), Stephanie ends up having way too much to drink at Lucy’s.
The end result is that Stephanie shows up drunk at the school dance and ends up embarrassing herself in front of Wheels while Voula is caught breaking curfew by her father. In typical Degrassi fashion, no one gets a happy ending!
I kind of groaned a little when I saw that this was going to be a Voula episode but actually, the episode did a good job of showing why Voula got so angry at Stephanie. As well, in what would be a Degrassi hallmark, the episode handled the theme of underage drinking with sensitivity as opposed to judgmental melodrama. Yes, Stephanie has too much to drink and ruined her date but the episode understood that, rather than being the end of the world, this is just a part of growing up. On Degrassi Junior High, teenagers were allowed to make mistakes.
Finally, during the dance, I spotted Joey dancing with Caitlin (Stacie Mistysyn), who is of course destined to become the great love of Joey’s life. It was a nice case of (probably inadvertent) foreshadowing.
Though the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences claim that the Oscars honor the best of the year, we all know that there are always worthy films and performances that end up getting overlooked. Sometimes, it’s because the competition too fierce. Sometimes, it’s because the film itself was too controversial. Often, it’s just a case of a film’s quality not being fully recognized until years after its initial released. This series of reviews takes a look at the films and performances that should have been nominated but were, for whatever reason, overlooked. These are the Unnominated.
In 1971, Clint Eastwood made his directorial debut with Play Misty For Me.
Eastwood plays Dave Garver, a DJ at a Carmel-By-The-Sea jazz station who has ambitions to some day go national. Every night, a woman named Evelyn (Jessica Walter) calls Dave and asks him to “Play Misty for me.” Eventually, Dave meets Evelyn in a bar and he takes her home with him. After sleeping with her, Dave tells Evelyn that he’s only interested in having a casual relationship. Evelyn, however, reveals that she has a far different interpretation of casual. Soon, Evelyn is dropping by Dave’s house unannounced and acting rather clingy, even appearing to attempt suicide when Dave tries to tell her that he’s not interested in having a serious relationship with her.
At first, it’s hard not to feel bad for Evelyn. Yes, she’s obviously unstable. Yes, she’s clingy. Yes, the scene in which she intentionally ruins Dave’s interview for a national job is difficult to watch. But there’s something so sincere and desperate about her need to have someone in her life that, again, it’s hard not to have sympathy for her. When she claims that Dave took advantage of her when they first met, she’s got a point. Dave obviously felt that Evelyn was a one-night stand that he would never have to see again. Evelyn feels differently.
Things chance when Dave eventually runs into his former girlfriend, Tobie Williams (Donna Mills). Dave and Tobie tentatively restart their relationship. When Evelyn finds out, she goes from being clingy to be homicidal. She goes from trashing Dave’s place to attacking Dave’s housekeeper to attacking Dave and Tobie themselves.
An assured directorial debut, Play Misty For Me shows that Eastwood had a strong directorial sensibility from the start. (It also shows, during an extended sequence in which Dave and Tobie attend a jazz festival, that Eastwood was always capable of being rather self-indulgent.) Eastwood uses the film to deconstruct his own confident persona, with Dave going from being a somewhat callous womanizer to ultimately being terrified for his life. The film is dominated by Jessica Walter’s performance as Evelyn. Walter is sad and terrifying, often in the same scene. Though the film doesn’t dig into what happened in Evelyn’s past to drive her to such extremes, Jessica Walter’s performance leaves no doubt that she’s someone who has been hurt by the world and is now so desperate for love and protection that she’ll strike out at anyone who she feels is denying it to her.
As a horror movie that was directed by an actor who, at the time, was still not a favorite of the critics, it’s perhaps not surprising that the Academy ignored Play Misty For Me. Still, it’s a shame. If nothing else, Jessica Walter’s performance was far more memorable that Janet Suzman’s nominated turn in the painfully dull Nicholas and Alexandra. It’s a brave performance and one that more than deserved to be honored.
So, my plan was to spend this week watching horror movies and writing up all sorts of reviews and stuff and scheduling them for the October Horrorthon. That’s what I do every year during the final week of September. This year, though, the universe had other plans.
On Monday, around 4 p.m., I noticed that I was getting a sore throat and that I was starting to feel a little bit light-headed. I figured it was either a cold or maybe a sinus infection. Instead, it was the flu. I spent most of this week in bed, running a fever, and coughing. I didn’t get to watch or write half of the things that I had planned for. Fortunately, I’m now recovering. I wouldn’t say that I’m a 100% well but I’m definitely doing better than I was just two days ago and, more importantly, I’m at a point where I can once against start watching and reviewing films. And just in time because …. IT’S OCTOBER!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN MONTH EVERYONE! THE OCTOBER HORRORTHON IS HERE! And we’ve got a lot in store for you, both here at the Shattered Lens and also at Horror Critic! On a personal note, this is my favorite time of year and I can’t wait to share it with all of you.
The 1945 Best Picture nominee, Spellbound, tells the story of Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman), a psychoanalyst at a mental hospital in my least favorite state, Vermont.
Constance has fallen in love with a man (Gregory Peck) who she believes to be Dr. Anthony Edwardes, the newly appointed director of the hospital. Dr. Edwardes is youngish and handsome and idealistic and authoritative …. well, he’s Gregory Peck. However, he also has an intense phobia about seeing any set of parallel lines. Curious to discover the reason for Edwardes’s phobia, Constance does a little digging on her own and discovers that Dr. Anthony Edwardes is not a doctor at all! Instead, he’s a guilt-stricken amnesiac who is convinced that he murdered Dr. Edwardes and took his place!
Constance, however, doesn’t believe that the Amnesiac is a murderer. She thinks that he is suffering from some sort of deep-rooted guilt that had led him to believe that killed the doctor. She wants a chance to psychoanalyze him and discover the truth about his background. Unfortunately, the police do think that the Amnesiac is a murderer and their determined to arrest him.
Constance and the Amnesiac go on the run, heading to the home of Constance’s mentor, Dr. Alexander Brulov (Michael Chekhov, the nephew of Anton Chekhov). With Brulov’s help, Constance analyzes a dream that the Amensiac had, one involving curtains decorated with eyes, the faceless proprietor of a casino, and a man falling off a mountain. Can Constance and Brulov solve the mystery of the Amnesiac’s identity before the police take him away to prison?
Spellbound was the last of the four Hitchcock best picture nominees and it was also the last film that Hitchcock made for producer David O. Selznick. Selznick was quite a fan of psychoanalysis and he insisted that Hitchcock not only make a movie about it but that he also use Selznick’s own therapist as a technical advisor on the project. Hitchcock, for his part, was able to bring in the surrealist Salvador Dali to help design the Amnesiac’s dream sequence but Selznick felt that the 20-minute sequence was too long and too weird and, as a result, it was cut down to two minutes for the final film. All this considered, it’s not a surprise that, despite the fact that Spellbound was a hit with critics and audiences, Hitchcock himself didn’t care much for it and considered it to be more of a Selznick film than a Hitchcock film. And it is true that the film’s total faith is psychoanalysis feels more like something one would expect to hear from a trendy producer than from a director like Hitchcock, who was known for both his dark wit and his rather cynical attitude towards anyone in authority.
For a film like Spellbound to truly work, there has to be some doubt about who the Amnesiac is. For the suspense to work, the audience has to feel that there’s at least a chance, even if it’s only a slight one, that the Amnesiac actually could be a murderer, despite the attempts of Constance and Brulov to prove that he’s not. And Spellbound is full of scenes that are meant to leave the audience wondering about whether or not the Amnesiac should be trusted. However, because the Amnesiac is played by Gregory Peck, there’s really no doubt that he’s innocent. Hitchcock was not particularly happy with Gregory Peck as his leading man. Peck projected a solid, middle-American integrity. It made him ideal for heroic and crusading roles but made him totally wrong for any role that required ambiguity. It’s difficult to believe that the Amnesiac is suffering from a guilt complex because it’s difficult to believe that Gregory Peck has ever done anything for which he should feel guilty. Cary Grant could have played the Amnesiac. Post-war Jimmy Stewart could have done an excellent job with the role. But Peck is just too upstanding and stolid for the role. In a role that calls from neurosis, Peck is kind of boring.
That said, the rest of the cast is fine, with Ingrid Bergman giving one of her best performance as Constance and Michael Chekhov bringing some needed nuance to a role that could have turned into a cliché. Leo G. Carroll has a small but pivotal role and he does a good job keeping the audience guessing as to his motivation. Even at a truncated two minutes, the Dali dream sequence is memorably bizarre and the famous shot of a gun pointed straight at the camera still carries a kick. This is a lesser Hitchcock film but, that said, it’s still a Hitchcock film and therefore worth viewing.
As I mentioned previously, this was the last of Hitchcock’s films to be nominated for Best Picture. Ironically, his best films — Rear Window, Vertigo, and Psycho among them — were yet to come. Spellbound was nominated for six Oscars but only won for Miklos Rozsa’s score. (Ingrid Bergman was nominated for Best Actress that year, not for her role in Spellbound but instead for The Bells of St. Mary’s.) The big Oscar winner that year was Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend.
During the month of October, we like to share classic episodes of horror-themed television. That was easier to do when we first started doing our annual October Horrorthon here at the Shattered Lens because every single episode of the original, black-and-white Twilight Zone was available on YouTube. Sadly, that’s no longer the case.
However, there is some good news! Twilight Zone may be gone but there are other horror shows on YouTube! For instance, I’ve discovered that there are several episodes of The Hitchhiker on YouTube! The Hitchhiker was an American/French/Canadian co-production that aired on HBO from 1983 to 1987 and on the USA Network from 1989 to 1991. It was an anthology show, one in which each story was introduced by a mysterious hitchhiker (played by Page Fletcher).
Let’s get things started with Perfect Order, an episode featuring Virginia Madsen as a model who works with a famous but eccentric photographer named Simon (Steve Inwood). It turn out that Simon’s eccentricity includes an obsession with death. Along with featuring good performances from Madsen and the underrated Inwood, this episode both satirizes the world of New York fashion and it features a climax that is full of laser beams. What more could one want for the beginning of October?
This episode originally aired on February 17th, 1987.
The 1983 slasher film, The Prey, opens with a wildfire raging through the Rocky Mountains, destroying a community of people who lived in a cave. 32 years later, the only survivor of the fire (played by Carel Struycken, who would later be memorably cast on Twin Peaks as the “It is happening again” giant), wanders through the forest. When he spots a middle-aged couple camping and tending to a campfire, the survivor snaps and kills them both.
The next morning, a van drives through the national park. Inside the van are three young couples, Nancy (Debbie Thureson) and Joel (Steve Bond), Bobbie (Lori Lethin) and Skip (Robert Wald), and Gail (Gayle Gannes) and Greg (Philip Wenckus). They are looking forward to a nice weekend of camping, sex, and mountain climbing. The girls are especially happy when they meet the handsome local parker ranger, Mark O’Brien (Jackson Bostwick). The couples head into wilderness, little realizing that they are being followed and watched by the murderous survivor.
Watching The Prey, I was reminded of why I don’t go camping. I mean, I like looking at nature. I like handsome park rangers. There’s a sweet scene where Mark tells an extremely corny joke to a baby deer and it made me go, “Awwwwww!” But seriously, I would never want to spend my night sitting around a campfire or sleeping on the ground. Not only is the wilderness full of bugs but there’s always the danger of getting trapped in a sudden storm or some other natural disaster. And I have to admit that I’m just not a fan of the way that people act while camping. My fear is that, if I ever did go camping, I would end up with people shouting, “Go! Go! Go!’ at me. If my camping companions insist on going mountain climbing, am I obligated to accompany them? If one of them falls off the side of the mountain, that’s really going to ruin my weekend.
As for The Prey as a film, the plot is standard slasher stuff. Attractive young people end up stranded out in the middle of nowhere and they are picked off, one at a time, by a monster who seems to take issue with anyone trying to have any fun. That said, The Prey has enough strange moments to make it memorable. With an 80-minute running time, The Prey is an oddly paced film. (And yes, oddly paced does often translate to boring.) The majority of the film is just made up with footage of the three couples walking through the forest and having conversations that were reportedly improvised by the cast. (Gayle laughs as she talks about a time that she nearly drowned.) The film is full of skewed camera angles that give the entire proceedings an off-balance feel and occasionally the action cuts away from the main characters to Mark playing a banjo or another park ranger (played by former Charlie Chaplin co-star Jackie Coogan) having a tense conversation with a policeman who calls to ask about the missing middle-aged couple. The survivor doesn’t really go after the main couples until the film’s final 15 minutes and the pace suddenly quickens as if to mirror the relentless violence of the film’s killer. The strange pacing and the weird details gives The Prey a dream-like feel and the ending, in which the survivor reveals that he has interests outside of killing, is fascinating in just how unexpectedly bizarre it is.
The Prey was undoubtedly made to take advantage of the popularity of other wilderness slasher films but it’s just weird enough to establish an identity of its own.
1973’s Blackenstein tells the story of Eddie Turner (Joe De Sue), a black man who served in Vietnam. Unfortunately, while serving his country, Eddie stepped on a landmine and lost his arms and his legs. Now back in Los Angeles, Eddie spends his days laying in a bed in a VA hospital, where he’s taunted by an orderly who, it turns out, is actually just upset because he wanted to join the army but he failed his physical. Because this film was made on the cheap, Eddie’s limbless state is represented by continually having the covers of his bed drawn up to his neck.
Eddie’s girlfriend, Dr. Winifred Walker (Ivory Stone), is upset because Eddie is having a hard time adjusting to life in the States and, having lost the lower half of his body, Eddie has been rendered impotent. She gets a job working with Dr. Stein (John Hart), a doctor who has down amazing things with DNA and RNA. He lives in a castle-like mansion and he has a laboratory that is full of lasers and beakers that are labeled “DNA.” Apparently, Dr. Stein can inject people with DNA …. don’t look at me like that, I didn’t write this movie …. and not only reverse the aging process but also help people regrow limbs.
Eddie is brought to the mansion to be Dr. Stein’s latest patient. Unfortunately, Dr. Stein’s assistant, Malcomb (Roosevelt Jackson), has fallen in love with Winifred and is stung when she tells him that her heart belongs to Eddie. Malcomb sabotages Eddie’s DNA injections so that Eddie, along with growing back his arms and his legs, also transforms into a turtleneck-wearing monster with a flattop. Eddie spends his days in a coma and his nights stalking Los Angeles.
Blackenstein was released at the height of the blaxploitation boom, when filmmakers were reinterpreting classic genres with black actors. Some of these films, like Shaft and Superfly, hold up very well and remain a part of the pop cultural landscape. And others, like Blackenstein, would be largely forgotten if not for the strangeness of their title. Blackenstein was clearly inspired by the success of Blacula, though it comes nowhere close to being as compelling as that film.
Blackenstein has more than a few problems. The pacing is abysmal. The plot requires a lot of smart people to do a lot of dumb things. As opposed to other films based on Mary Shelley’s novel, the Monster is neither scary nor sympathetic. Eddie Turner was played by a non-actor named Joe de Sue, who was hired because he was a client of the Frank Salteri, the criminal lawyer-turned-filmmaker who produced the film. Joe de Sue rarely speaks and when he does, he turns his face away from the camera and it is fairly obvious that his dialogue was dubbed in after the scene was shot. Ivory Stone and Roosevelt Jackson awkwardly deliver their lines about DNA and RNA in a tone that suggests that neither they nor the filmmakers were exactly sure what either one of those were. John Hart is perhaps the most mild mad scientist in the history of horror cinema.
One could argue that there’s an interesting subtext to this film, with its scenes of a white scientist conducting a dangerous medical experiment on a black man who is not in a position to refuse. But let’s not fool ourselves. This film is not Blacula, with its title character being transformed into a vampire as punishment for standing up to Dracula’s racism. Blackenstein had very little on its mind, beyond cashing in on the then-blaxploitation boom. The title promises a certain over-the-top silliness but, ultimately, this film is way too boring for something called Blackenstein.
2021’s Deadly Nightshade is not an easy film to describe.
An analog voice asks us to return to a time in the recent past, when people watched movies on VHS tapes and the television was the world’s main source of escape. In Brixton, Victoria (Suzie Houlihan) goes to her flat, excited to spend the weekend in Brighton with her boyfriend, Marcus (Matthew Laird). She finds a mysterious man named Adam (Christopher Blackburn) in the flat. Adam says that he’s a friend of Marcus’s and he’s going to be staying in the flat for the weekend. Adam wants Victoria to listen to a tape recording of what he claims is an exorcism. Victoria is not comfortable with him.
Marcus finally shows up, covered in blood that is not his. Marcus says that he witnessed an accident on the way home and he stopped to rescue one of the women involved. Suddenly, that woman shows up. Her name is Mia (Lottie Johnson) and it appears that she’s planning on staying in the apartment as well.
The analog voice invites us to watch a documentary about the real events that inspired Deadly Nightshade but an appearance by Eric Roberts as occult expert Father Walsh clues us in that the documentary is just as fictional as the film that we’re watching.
Strange things continue to happen at the flat. Victoria’s mother mysteriously appears at one point. Adam has visions of a woman lying in bed and telling him that he’s too obsessed with television. Victoria falls asleep and when she wakes up, Mia is claiming that Marcus is her boyfriend and that Adam is Victoria’s boyfriend and no one really seems to know why Victoria is even at the flat. For all the talk of spending the weekend in Brighton, no one seems like they’re in a particular hurry to leave the flat….
It’s an odd film and I would suggest not trying too hard to follow the plot. It’s a film that plays out like a filmed nightmare, working on its own bizarre strain of logic. Just as in a dream, personalities change randomly and the lay-out of the flat seems to alter from scene to scene. Plot points, like Adam’s exorcism tape, are brought up and then abandoned just to mysteriously be brought up again. It’s not a movie that makes much sense but, if you relax and just go with it, it definitely leaves an impression.
As for Eric Roberts, he’s not in much of the film. It’s pretty obvious that he filmed his scenes in an hour or two, probably at his own home. It wouldn’t surprise me if he provided his own clerical collar. That said, if you’re going to have a mysterious man talking about the supernatural in your low-budget film, I would say that Eric Roberts is who you would want to go with.
Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:
Embittered by the death of his wife, Samuel Peters (Edward Furlong) turns to voodoo in an attempt to bring her back to life. Kalfu (Corey Feldman), the lord of the underworld, agrees to close the gates of Hell and allow the dead to roam the Earth with Peters as the immortal zombie king.
Edward Furlong selling his soul to Corey Feldman might sound like the premise of an entertainingly bad movie but, unfortunately, nether Furlong nor Feldman have much screen time. As hard as it is believe, The Zombie King may be one of the first recent films that would have benefitted from more Corey Feldman and Edward Furlong. Instead, the two of them are basically just special guest stars with limited screen time.
Instead, the majority of the movie is about a group of humans trying to survive in a village that’s been invaded by zombies and quarantined by the government. The movie tries to balance horror with British humor in a style that tries way too hard to duplicate Simon Pegg’s success with Shaun of the Dead, right down to casting a Nick Frost look-alike as a quirky milkman named Munch.
Much ends up in a group led by a stoic mailman named Ed Wallace (George McCluskey), who says that delivering the mail in Northgate was just as dangerous as being a member of the SAS. The movie mixes scenes of zombie mayhem with scenes of Ed, Mulch, and the other survivors having very British arguments about how best to deal with the situation and whether it’s safer to head to a church or a pub. There are some amusing moments but there’s even more jokes that fall flat and Munch is never as funny as a character as the film seems to think he is.
Even with Edward Furlong welcoming the recently dead to “Hell on Earth” and Corey Feldman giving a surprisingly energetic performance as the lord of the underworld, The Zombie King never escapes the shadow of all the zombie comedies that came before it.
Through the Shattered Lens 