This is a film that I share every year for Horrorthon and can you blame me? Check out this pitch: Leonard Nimoy is a race car driver who can see into the future and who uses his powers to solve crimes!
Seriously, if that’s not enough to get you to watch the 1973 made-for-TV movie Baffled!, then I don’t know what is. In the film, Nimoy takes a break from racing so that he and a parapsychologist (played by Susan Hampshire) can solve the mystery of the visions that Nimoy is having of a woman in a mansion. This movie was meant to serve as a pilot and I guess if the series had been picked up, Nimoy would have had weekly visions. Of course, the movie didn’t lead to a series but Baffled! is still fun in a 70s television sort of way. Thanks to use of what I like to call “slo mo of doom,” a few of Nimoy’s visions are creepy and the whole thing ends with the promise of future adventures that were sadly never to be. And it’s a shame because I’ve always wondered what was going on with that couple at the airport!
Enjoy Baffled! Can you solve the mystery before Leonard?
What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable or streaming? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!
If you were having trouble getting to sleep last night, you could have jumped over to Prime and watched 1968’s Greetings.
Greetings tells the story of three friends, all of whom live in New York and all of whom are dealing with the possibility of being drafted. Paul (Jonathan Warden) gets his “greetings” from the U.S. Government and tries to avoid being drafted by pretending to be a gay Neo-Nazi. Lloyd (Gerrit Graham) deals with the stress of being young in the late ’60s by obsessing over the JFK assassination, to the extent that he even uses a felt-tip pen to illustrate JFK’s wounds on his girlfriend’s naked body. Jon Rubin (Robert De Niro) tries computer dating, hits on every woman he meets, and tries to launch a career as an adult filmmaker. The great character actor Allen Garfield has a brief cameo as “the smut peddler,” and his scene with De Niro feels largely improvised.
Technically, Greetings was not Brian De Palma’s directorial debut. His first film was The Wedding Party, which he shot in 1963 (and which featured a 19-year-old De Niro making his film debut) but which wasn’t released until 1969. However, De Palma was one of three directors who worked on The Wedding Party, and De Palma himself has dismissed it as essentially being a student film. De Palma’s second film was Murder à la Mod, which was his first thriller but which was also little-seen. Greetings was De Palma’s first film to actually gain attention for both the director and co-stars De Niro and Graham. (Warden, sad to say, never makes much of an impression.)
Seen today, it’s definitely a product of its time. After a note telling us that the film has been slapped with an X rating, Greetings opens and ends with footage of Lyndon B. Johnson asking viewers if they’ve ever had it “so good.” Warden, Graham, and De Niro are all playing familiar types: the 1960s urban pseudo-intellectual. De Palma often directs in a semi-documentary style. In the scenes on the streets of New York, it’s not unusual to see bystanders stopping to stare directly at De Palma’s camera. There are a few scenes that are distractingly sped up, which is a bit annoying, but it’s also a sign of De Palma’s love for experimenting with what exactly can be done with a camera. The humor is pure De Palma: dark, paranoid, and occasionally deliberately provocative. I certainly find Greetings to be a funnier film than its sequel, Hi, Mom!. If Hi, Mom! was clearly De Niro’s film, Greetings feels like it belongs to Gerrit Graham. De Niro may have been the more versatile actor, but Graham had a more natural comedic timing.
The most interesting thing about Greetings is how political it actually is. De Palma is often described as being more about technique than anything else, but Greetings reveals him to have been far more sympathetic to the counterculture than contemporaries like Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg. The film itself is largely plotless by design. Instead, the film is De Palma’s attempt to capture the attitude of a very specific time and place. Greetings is a film that probably could have only been made in New York in the late ’60s. If nothing else, it’s a time capsule from a very different age.
In 2007’s Welcome to Paradise, Crystal Bernard stars as Debbie Laramie. Debbie is a preacher who belongs to one of those weird Protestant churches where it’s apparently appropriate to heckle someone while they’re giving a sermon. After Debbie scandalizes her parish by removing her jacket while preaching, she is reassigned to a church in the small town of Paradise. Apparently, this is not the first time that Debbie has been reassigned. She’s a rebellious preacher who does things her own way or, at least, that’s what we’re told. (She doesn’t ever seem that rebellious to me, but then again, I’m used to the Jesuits.) Debbie’s teenage son certainly isn’t happy about having to move again.
In Paradise, Debbie makes a name for herself by reaching out to the town’s surprisingly large homeless population. She invites a street performer named Trevor (Lou Beatty, Jr.) to play his guitar at the church. She holds a potluck dinner to help feed the residents of the local shelter. When a sudden storm approaches, she allows Frances (Beth Grant) to spend the night on the church’s back porch. (Debbie tries to convince Frances to come home with her, but Frances doesn’t want to impose.) Unfortunately, Frances gets cold and tries to build a small fire for warmth. The next thing anyone knows, the church is burning down.
A snooty bishop tells Debbie that the decision has been made to revoke the church’s charter and that all the members will be assigned to the new megachurch. Debbie, however, has already found an abandoned barn that she thinks she can turn into a church, and a local businessman named Bobby Brown (Brian Dennehy—wait, BRIAN DENNEHY!?) has agreed to help fund the new church. Debbie is told that if she can have everything ready to go in a week, the church will keep its charter. Otherwise, Debbie will have to find yet another new job, her son will have to move again, and the residents of the shelter won’t have anywhere to go.
This film wasn’t actually that bad. I liked the fact that it not only took place in small-town Texas but also captured the feeling of living in a small town. Paradise is the type of town where the richest man in town owns a used car lot and where everyone lends a helping hand to those in need. If this were a horror movie, of course, the town would have turned out to be a haven for vampires. Since this was a religious movie, it just turned out to be a nice place to live. Crystal Bernard gave a likable performance as Debbie, and Brian Dennehy, of course, was perfectly cast as the gruff but good-natured businessman. There were actually quite a few familiar faces in the film. William Shockley, Beth Grant, Ken Jenkins, and Jim O’Heir all made appearances. Even comedian Timothy Stack showed up in a small role.
In the end, Welcome to Paradise is a sweet-natured and likable movie. If it had been set during a December snowstorm, it could have easily been mistaken for a Hallmark film.
Having left the X-Men after the death of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), Logan (Hugh Jackman) is now living as a hermit in the Canadian wilderness. He is haunted by dreams of his past and visions of Jean. (In the X-Men comic books, Scott Summers was the one who went off to live as a hermit and was haunted by memories of Jean, but since Scott was killed off in X-Men: The Last Stand, Logan was the one who got this story and the visions of lingerie-clad Jean, despite never having been in a truly romantic relationship with her.) Logan is drawn out of hiding by Yukio (Rila Fukushima), a mutant who can predict when people are going to die. Yukio works for Ichiro Yashida (Haruhiko Yamanouchi), a Japanese industrialist who first met Logan during World War II. Logan saved Yashida’s life when Nagasaki was bombed.
Logan and Yukio return to Japan, where Logan discovers that Yashida is on the verge of death. Yashida and Dr. Green (Svetlana Khodchenkova) have apparently developed a way to transfer Logan’s self-healing powers to Yashida, but Logan refuses to cooperate, explaining that immortality is a curse. When Yashida dies, Logan finds himself at war with the Yakuza and also without his power of self-regeneration.
The Wolverine isn’t bad. Even though Logan is no longer as interesting a character as he was when he made his first film appearance in X-Men, the film features some of the best action sequences to be found in the entire X-Men franchise. The extended fight sequence that takes place on top of a bullet train is especially exciting, and it holds up even when you watch it a second time. Unlike the previous X-Men film, The Wolverine makes good use of its characters. The Silver Samurai may be a lesser villain in the comic books, but in this movie, he was one of the few opponents who seem able to match Logan’s combat skills. For the most part, the movie respects the lore of the comic books without getting bogged down in mythology.
Wolverine finally makes peace with himself at the end of this movie. Of course, as soon as he does, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart show up with a new mission for him. A hero’s work is never done.
Ryan and Emily Fleege (played by Chris J. Murray and Brit Shaw) have just moved into a new home with their six-year-old daughter, Leila (Ivy George). They are being visited by both Ryan’s brother, Mike (Dan Gill), and Emily’s best friend, Skyler (Olivia Dudley). While cleaning out the garage, Mike and Ryan come across an old video camera and several VHS tapes featuring young Katie and Kristi from the previous Paranormal Activity films. It turns out that their house has been built over the remains of Katie and Kristi’s old house and that the old video camera can pick up and record traces of ghosts and evil spirits.
That last bit is exactly why this installment of Paranormal Activity doesn’t work. The previous films were scary because the characters could hear and sometimes feel the spirits but they couldn’t actually see them. That always left open the possibility that they were just imagining things. In this one, everyone can actually see the evidence of the house being haunted but they still don’t leave! This is the first Paranormal Activity to make heavy use of CGI, which goes against the whole idea of the films being found footage.
The other problem is that, six films in, the Paranormal Activity series finally fell victim to its own increasingly complex mythology. The first two films worked because they kept things simple. Things started to get more complicated during the third film. By the time Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension was released, the story had grown to include a coven of witches, a family curse, a demon named Toby, and now a camera that can film otherwise invisible spirits. The more elements that are added, the harder it is to ignore the holes in the plot and illogical actions of the characters.
I would have ended things with the second film, but I also would have lost out on all the money made by the third, fourth, and fifth films. Even this installment, which was the weakest box office performer of all of the films, still made a profit. That shows how much I know.
“It’s what we do, Rose. We continue.” — Frank Parker
The scariest thing about the Parker family is how much of their cruelty falls under the heading of being a good parent. That’s the ugly little truth running through Jim Mickle’s We Are What We Are, a horror movie where providing for your children and destroying their lives have become practically the same thing. Released in 2013, this loose remake of Jorge Michel Grau’s 2010 Mexican film builds its nightmare around a household that treats cannibalism as an inherited obligation. The premise sounds outrageous, but Mickle approaches it with enough seriousness to make the family’s beliefs feel disturbingly entrenched. The result is less about the shock of what these people eat than the damage done by teaching children that love requires unquestioning obedience.
The Parkers’ carefully insulated existence begins to unravel when their mother suddenly dies, leaving teenage daughters Iris and Rose to take over her responsibilities. Unfortunately, those responsibilities include preparing the family’s annual ritual meal. Their father, Frank, considers maintaining that tradition nonnegotiable, regardless of what his daughters might think or feel. Meanwhile, relentless rain starts bringing evidence of the family’s activities into the open, attracting the attention of local physician Doctor Barrow. It’s a straightforward setup, but the competing pressures work well together: the world outside is getting closer just as life inside the house becomes increasingly unbearable.
What makes the family unsettling is that their behavior follows a recognizable domestic logic. Frank expects his daughters to help around the house, care for their younger brother, Rory, and preserve the values he believes hold them together. Those expectations aren’t inherently sinister. The horror comes from what he has attached to them. Murder and cannibalism have become extensions of household duty, protected from scrutiny by the idea that previous generations knew best. Mickle doesn’t need to make every conversation openly threatening. Once that arrangement becomes clear, even an ordinary instruction carries the possibility of something awful.
Bill Sage makes Frank a convincingly suffocating presence. He isn’t an entertaining monster whose outrageous behavior gives the audience permission to enjoy him. He’s a miserable, controlling father whose certainty leaves almost no room for anyone else. Sage understands how frightening it can be when someone treats his authority as a fact of nature. Frank doesn’t think he needs to win an argument because he barely recognizes that an argument could exist. His grief complicates the performance without excusing him. He has lost his wife, but his response is to force his daughters deeper into the system that shaped her life.
Ambyr Childers and Julia Garner provide the emotional weight as Iris and Rose. Childers gives Iris the worn-down composure of someone being pushed into adulthood before she has had much opportunity to understand herself. Garner makes Rose’s resistance feel less like easy rebelliousness than a growing inability to tolerate what everyone else insists is necessary. Their performances work especially well together because the sisters don’t respond to their circumstances identically. Love keeps them connected, but it doesn’t erase their differences. They’re trying to protect each other while navigating a household that has taught them to confuse protection with participation.
That ambiguity is one of the film’s strongest qualities. Iris and Rose are victims of their upbringing, but they’re also being drawn into perpetuating its violence. Mickle doesn’t flatten that situation into a simple division between innocent children and an evil adult. Instead, he lets the discomfort linger. Understanding why the sisters struggle to resist doesn’t make the consequences disappear. Their affection for Rory adds another painful layer, since caring for him means deciding whether to preserve the only family structure they know or recognize how dangerous that structure has become. The stakes are emotional long before they become physical.
The atmosphere reinforces that feeling of a household slowly poisoning itself. Rain hangs over everything, and the woods surrounding the Parker home offer little sense of freedom. Cinematographer Ryan Samul gives the film a muted, damp beauty that makes the setting feel both natural and faintly diseased. Inside, the worn rooms suggest generations of people living under the same expectations. Nothing needs to announce itself as sinister because the whole place feels burdened by repetition. The house isn’t frightening because it looks unfamiliar. It’s frightening because its familiar domestic spaces have been organized around something nobody is allowed to question.
Mickle’s slow pacing generally suits that approach. He lets silence, routine, and uncomfortable proximity do much of the work, saving explicit violence for moments when it can actually break through the film’s restraint. That patience makes the horror feel embedded in everyday life rather than dropped into it for a quick reaction. Still, there’s a difference between letting tension develop and simply holding a mood, and the movie occasionally drifts toward the latter. A few stretches repeat the same emotional information without finding a fresh angle. The oppressive atmosphere remains effective, but the storytelling doesn’t always move with equal confidence.
The outside investigation is the clearest example of that limitation. Michael Parks brings welcome sadness and gravity to Doctor Barrow, but his search sometimes feels more mechanically plotted than the family drama. We’re waiting for him to establish what the movie has already made clear, which takes some urgency out of his discoveries. The historical flashbacks have a similar drawback. They give the ritual a background, but the explanation is less compelling than watching its influence play out between living people. The film is strongest when it stays close to the sisters and lets inherited belief reveal itself through behavior rather than additional exposition.
When the ending finally tears through that restraint, the violence feels like a release of everything the family has kept buried. It’s messy, startling, and open to debate as a culmination of the sisters’ psychological journey, but it certainly refuses an easy resolution. We Are What We Are has its slow patches and occasionally spells out ideas that are already clear. Even so, its performances and oppressive sense of place make it a strong, deeply unpleasant family horror film. What stays with you isn’t simply the cannibalism. It’s Frank’s conviction that passing his damage on to his children is the most loving thing he can do.
One of my favorite things about my lifetime of loving movies has been those times when I’ve discovered the actors who really appeal to me. It all started with Charles Bronson when I was in grade school. I call it going through a phase, and while I’m in that phase, I try to watch everything that actor has done that looks the least bit interesting to me. Of course, my Charles Bronson phase has never ended, but there has always been room for additional phases, whether it be actors like Roy Scheider, James Woods, Toshiro Mifune, Chow Yun-Fat, or yes, Michael Caine. When I went through my initial Caine phase, I focused on movies like THE ITALIAN JOB, GET CARTER, and DRESSED TO KILL. Later in his career, I focused on his movies like A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM, SECONDHAND LIONS, and HARRY BROWN. I knew about THE HAND, but I never watched it before moving on to the next phase. But this being Horror-Thon, and me looking for interesting movies I’ve never seen before, this seemed like the perfect time to spend a couple of hours with Michael Caine and his hand!
THE HAND finds Caine playing Jonathan Lansdale, a successful comic book artist whose life takes a turn for the worse after a car accident results in the gruesome loss of his right hand. That would be bad enough for anyone, but his newfound situation will no longer allow him to create his beloved comic book, and his struggling marriage only seems to be getting worse. When a series of increasingly disturbing events seem to be taking place around him, we’re left to wonder… is his missing hand somehow responsible for the escalating violence around him, or is he going out of his mind?!
One of the intriguing aspects of THE HAND is that it was directed by Oliver Stone who would go on to win Oscars for directing the films PLATOON and BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. Having just won the Oscar for Best Screenplay for MIDNIGHT EXPRESS, Stone was a hot property at the time so it’s no surprise that he was given another chance to direct. He had written and directed the film SEIZURE back in 1974, but this was his first major studio film. With a man of his acclaim and talent in the director’s chair, and with a legendary actor like Michael Caine in the lead, THE HAND would have to be worth watching, right?
I’m going to definitely say “Yes!” Watching Stone deliver the absurd visuals of a creepy severed hand performing a series of gruesome killings brought a ridiculous smile to my face. I’m actually laughing as I type this and think about them again. Not content with my cheap thrills though, Stone also tries to get deep into his main character’s mind so he can play with the uncertainty between reality and imagination. I’m not saying this attempt at psychological depth always works, but it’s kind of fun seeing him try to turn such silly material into something of more substance.
And then there’s Caine in the lead role, which is my primary reason for watching the film. I always like it when he loses it on screen, and he definitely gets to explore his dark side as Jonathan Lansdale. There’s nothing suave about this guy. Rather, he’s playing a man whose life is falling completely apart. While we can at least superficially understand why he would be so frustrated, Caine’s eyes reveal a man who’s leaving the world of reality, and there’s no scenery that he’s not willing to chew by the end. I’ve read that Caine did this movie for the paycheck, and while that may be true, he definitely seems invested to me. Other solid performances come from Andrea Marcovicci as his wife, Bruce McGill as his friend, and Annie McEnroe as his lover. Unfortunately, no one who gets too close is safe from his hand of death!
I understand that not everyone is going to enjoy THE HAND. I’ve said many times before that I’m a fan of actors, and if a movie stars one of my favorites, I’ll give it a lot of grace. Still, I can’t deny that I had a good time watching it even if it might have overstayed its welcome just a bit. While I won’t give the movie a hearty, full-throated recommendation, if you’re a fan of Stone, Caine, or oddball horror films, you just may find a lot to enjoy about this film like I did.
“Man is a feeling creature, and because of it, the greatest in the universe….”
Hell yeah! You tell ’em, Peter Graves!
In 1956’s It Conquered The World. Graves plays a scientist who watches in horror as his small town and all of the people who he loves and works with are taken over by an alien. Rival scientist Lee Van Cleef thinks that the alien is going to make the world a better place but Graves understands that a world without individual freedom isn’t one that’s worth living in.
This is one of Corman’s most entertaining films, featuring not only Graves and Van Cleef but also the great Beverly Garland. Like many horror and science fiction films of the 50s, it’s subtext is one of anti-collectivism. Depending on your politics, you could view the film as either a criticism of communism or McCarthyism. Watching the film today, with its scenes of the police and the other towns people hunting anyone who fails to conform or follow orders, it’s hard not to see the excesses of the COVID era.
Of course, there’s also a very persuasive argument to be made that maybe we shouldn’t worry too much about subtext and we should just enjoy the film as a 50s B-movie that was directed with the Corman touch.
Regardless of how interpret the film, I defy anyone not to smile at the sight of ultra-serious Peter Graves riding his bicycle from one location to another.
Here, for your viewing pleasure, is It Conquered The World!
Whenever it’s time to share this film for Horrorthon, I have a little story that I like to tell:
Enter singing.
Little Shop.…Little Shop of Horrors.…Little Shop.…Little Shop of Terrors….
When I was 19 years old, I was in a community theater production of the musical Little Shop of Horrors. Though I think I would have made the perfect Audrey, everybody always snickered whenever I sang so I ended up as a part of “the ensemble.” Being in the ensemble basically meant that I spent a lot of time dancing and showing off lots of cleavage. And you know what? The girl who did play Audrey was screechy, off-key, and annoying and after every show, all the old people in the audience always came back stage and ignored her and went straight over to me. So there.
Anyway, during rehearsals, our director thought it would be so funny if we all watched the original film. Now, I’m sorry to say, much like just about everyone else in the cast, this was my first exposure to the original and I even had to be told that the masochistic dentist patient was being played by Jack Nicholson. However, I’m also very proud to say that — out of that entire cast — I’m the only one who understood that the zero-budget film I was watching was actually better than the big spectacle we were attempting to perform on stage. Certainly, I understood the film better than that screechy little thing that was playing Audrey.
The first Little Shop of Horrors certainly isn’t scary and there’s nobody singing about somewhere that’s green (I always tear up when I hear that song, by the way). However, it is a very, very funny film with the just the right amount of a dark streak to make it perfect Halloween viewing.
So, if you have 72 minutes to kill, check out the original and the best Little Shop of Horrors….
Today’s horror scene that I love comes from 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein!
In this scene, directed by James Whale, the Monster (Boris Karloff) meets his first friend, a blind hermit played by O.P. Heggie. It’s a scene that features Karloff at his best and it’s still touching, even if it is kind of hard to watch it without thinking about Peter Boyle accidentally burning down Gene Hackman’s shack in Young Frankenstein.
