Category Archives: Film Review

October Positivity: Nikki and the Perfect Stranger (dir by Jefferson Moore)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The third part of The Perfect Stranger trilogy finds Nikki Comiskey at a crossroads …. again.

The film begins with Nikki (now played by Julianna Allen) recapping how, many years ago, she was a high-profile attorney who, after having dinner with Jesus (Jefferson Moore), decided to ditch her legal career and devote herself to her family.  (Nikki explains that she was a “closet agnostic” before she met Jesus.)  Ten years after having dinner with Nikki, Jesus appeared to Nikki’s teenage daughter, Sarah, and encouraged her to not abandon the faith of her parents.  However, while Sarah is off thriving at college, Nikki feels like her life is in a rut.  Though she still believes, she no longer gets much out of going to church and, once again, her marriage is starting to feel strained.

A visit with her mom doesn’t go well.  Mom wants to know why Nikki had to abandon her legal career.  Nikki gets annoyed and storms out of the house.  She gets in her car and starts to make the long drive home.  She calls her husband and explains what happened.  Her husband informs her that he’s going to busy working on the roof for a bit.  (Hmmm …. I wonder if this seemingly random bit of dialogue is going to come up again towards the end of the film?)  While Nikki is driving home, she sees a familiar figure standing on the side of the road.

Yes, it’s Jesus (though he’s currently going by Josh).

Nikki gives Jesus a ride and they discuss why Nikki is feeling so unsatisfied with her life.  Along the way, they meet a trucker with a porn addiction and they take him to dinner so that Jesus can encourage him to go to rehab.  (At the diner, Nikki tries to order a late night salad.  Needless to say, that doesn’t go well.)  Finally, Nikki gets a chance to help out a minister named Tony (Matt Wallace), who is a character in another film that Jefferson Moore made in which he played Jesus.

(In fact, I discovered that Moore also starred in a TV series called The Stranger, which was a spin-off of The Perfect Stranger films.  So really, there’s an entire Perfect Stranger cinematic universe out there.)

My main impression of Nikki and the Perfect Stranger is that it was surprisingly short.  With a running time of 63 minutes, it definitely felt more like an extra long episode of an anthology show than an actual movie.  That said, Nikki and the Perfect Stranger doesn’t feel as preachy as the previous Perfect Stranger films.  I imagine that’s because the previous two films featured Jesus “educating” an agnostic while this third one features Jesus checking up on an old friend and giving advice.  Since he’s a bit less condescending and argumentative in this film, Jefferson Moore is far more likable here than he was in the previous films.  As opposed to some of the films that I’ve watched this month, the emphasis is more on helping than on judging.  (I can only imagine the tortures to which the Christianos would have subjected that trucker.)  By the time the end credits roll, Nikki’s story has been efficiently wrapped up.

The TSL’s Horror Grindhouse: The Day Time Ended (dir by John “Bud” Cardos)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

At the start of 1980’s The Day Time Ended, the Williams Family has relocated to the desert!  

(Why the desert?  I have no idea.  I’ve been told that the hot air of the desert would be ideal for my asthma but then I’d have to live in the desert and, from what I’ve seen in the movies, bad things always happen in the desert.  If it’s not aliens, it’s zombie cowboys.)

Grandpa (Jim Davis), Grandma (Dorothy Malone), Richard (Christopher Mitchum, looking a lot like his father, Robert), Beth (Marcy Lafferty), and their young daughter, Jenny (Natasha Ryan) have moved into a very nice ranch house that appears to be sitting in the middle of nowhere.  The house comes with a barn, a few horses, and …. ALIENS!

At first, Jenny is the only one to notice the strange blue light that keeps glowing behind the barn.  But soon, the rest of the family is seeing UFOs and weird (but kind of cute) creatures are knocking on the front door and saying hi.  Lizard men appear in the distance and beckon for the family to follow them.  Soon, the house itself is being zapped through time and space….

This is going to be a short review but, then again, The Day Time Ended is a short movie.  With a running time of only 75 minutes (not including the end credits), The Day Time Ended feels less like a movie and more like an extended episode of The Twilight Zone.  That said, if it was an extended episode of The Twilight Zone, it would be considered to be one of the more enjoyable episodes of the series.  While none of the characters are particularly complex or deeply written, the cast is believable as a family and everyone does a good enough job that the viewer won’t want to see anything bad happen to any of them.  (I’m also happy to say that all of those horses are really pretty and — fear not! — for once, no harm befalls any of the animals.)  The motives of the aliens are kept ambiguous throughout the film, leaving the viewers as confused and intrigued as the family and the final shot is somehow both silly and tremendously satisfying at the same time.  The Day Time Ended is a B-movie but it’s an entertaining B-movie.

Directed by B-movie specialist, John “Bud” Cardos, this is one of those movies where the cheapness of the special effects add to the film’s charm.  Initially, the UFOs are represented by lights darting through the sky.  (Residents of Texas will immediately think of our beloved and yet unexplained Marfa Lights.)  When the UFOs are finally seen in close-up, they are obviously plastic models but, in this age of excessive CGI, there’s something undeniably charming about the idea of going to the trouble to build plastic models.  The claymation aliens are adorable!  Seriously, there are some films that you just can’t help but kind of love and, for me, The Day Time Ended is one of those films.

Iceman (1984, directed by Fred Schepisi)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Scientists at an arctic base make an amazing discovery when they find the body of a prehistoric man that has been perfectly preserved in the ice.  Dr. Stanley Shepherd (Timothy Hutton) and his fellow scientists suspect that the Iceman (John Lone) might be in a state of suspended animation.  Instead of performing an autopsy when the body thaws it, the scientists attempt to resuscitate him.

And somehow, it works.

The Iceman, who is eventually named Charlie, is stunned to be in the modern world and does not know how to react to the scientists studying him.  Only Dr. Shepherd treats Charlie as a human being instead of a laboratory specimen.  Despite not speaking the same language, Charlie and Shepherd bond.  Shepherd realizes that Charlie misses his family and eventually, he figures out that, when he was frozen, Charlie was attempting to stop the Ice Age by offering himself up as a sacrifice to a bird god.  When Charlie sees a helicopter, he mistakes it for his god and starts tying to escape from the base.  Realizing that Charlie will eventually be killed and experimented upon, Shepherd tries to help him escape.

If, and it’s a big “if,” you can overlook the implausibility of Charlie being in suspended animation for over 40,000 years, Iceman is actually a really good film with intelligent performances from both Timothy Hutton and John Lone.  Lone is especially good as Charlie, capturing his confusion, fear, and eventually his heart.  Even though he’s in a strange place and time, Charlie never stops thinking of his family and trying to get back to them.  The film works because, like Shepherd, it understands Charlie is too good for the modern world.

International Horror Film Review: Baron Blood (dir by Mario Bava)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Directed by the great Mario Bava, the 1972 Italian film, Baron Blood, tells a story of gothic horror.

During the 19th century, there was no one as feared in Austria as Baron Otto Von Kleist.  Much like the infamous Gilles de Rais, the Baron was a sadist who used his noble background as a cover for his macabre activities.  In his castle, he murdered hundreds of villagers and, for that, he was nicknamed Baron Blood.  He also had an accused witch burned at the stake.  As she died, she cursed the Baron, saying that he would continually rise from the dead just so he could be killed again and again.  When you think about it, that’s actually a pretty badass curse.

One hundred years later, the Baron’s American descendant, Peter Kleist (Antonio Cantafora), arrives in Austria to check out the family castle.  The castle is being converted into a tacky hotel where tourists can stay in the same rooms where the Baron used to kill his victims.  However, Peter is not particularly concerned with what’s about to happen to the castle.  Instead, he’s in Austria because he’s discovered a parchment that contains an incantation that will bring the Baron back to life.  He wants to give it a try, more for his own amusement than anything else.  Neither her nor Eva (Elke Sommer), a college student who is studying the hotel’s architecture, really think that they are going to bring the Baron back to life by reading the incantation at midnight.  Of course, they’re wrong.

It’s easy to make fun of Peter and Eva for being so naïve as to think that it wouldn’t be a big deal to cast a magic spell but it’s not like they realize that they’re characters in an Italian horror film.  They don’t know that their lives are being directed by Mario Bava.  To be honest, if I was there, I probably would have joined them in reading the spell.  Sometimes, it can be fun to tempt fate.

That said, in the case, fate should not have been tempted.  People are soon dying.  When the man behind the hotel project is murdered, a wheelchair-bound millionaire named Alfred Becker (Joseph Cotten) shows up and purchases the castle for himself and announces plans to restore it.  Will restoring the castle bring peace to the village or is the witch’s curse too powerful to defeat?

Baron Blood is often described as being one of Bava’s lesser films and is it true that it feels a bit conventional, particularly when compared to the subversive and satiric Bay of Blood and the surreal Lisa and the Devil.  Baron Blood was a film that Bava himself was reportedly not enthused about making, one that he took on only because his last few films had struggled at the box office and he didn’t feel he would get any better offers.  Perhaps that’s why a definite strain of melancholy and disillusionment runs through Baron Blood, a film in which a beautiful castle is destined to be turned into a tacky tourist trap by a businessman who could hardly care less about either history or aesthetics.

Though the story is a bit predictable (and you’ll have little trouble guessing which character is the Baron in disguise), I actually like Baron Blood.  Not surprisingly, considering that it was a Bava film, Baron Blood is heavy on gothic atmosphere, so much so that it feels almost like an extra-bloody Hammer film.  Both the castle and the village are full of shadows, from which anyone or anything could emerge at any moments and the cold grandeur of the castle is nicely contrasted with the garishness of 70s Europe.  A visually striking scene where Eva flees from an attacker is especially well-directed and the film ends on a properly macabre note, one that once again feels as if it’s putting a distinctly Italian spin on a situation one would usually expect to find in a Hammer production.

Antonio Cantafora is a bit of a stiff but Elke Sommer gives an energetic and committed performance as someone who is torn between preserving the past and embracing the modern world.  She doesn’t get to do as much in this film as she did in Lisa and the Devil but she’s still a sympathetic lead and someone to whom most viewers will be able to relate.  We care about her character and, as a result, we care about discover just what exactly the Baron has in store for her.

Baron Blood may not have been a critical or a box office success when it was originally released but it has achieved a certain immortality.  In a development that could have been lifted from one of Bava’s films, the sounds of the Baron’s victims screaming were later lifted from this film, remixed, and sold as being a recording that had apparently been made of sinners screaming from behind the gates of Hell.  To this day, there are sites that insist that this recording is genuine.  One hopes that Bava would have appreciated the admittedly dark humor of it all.

Horror Film Review: Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (dir by Fred Sears)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1956’s Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, the aliens have finally decided that it’s time to land their ships and meet with the Earthlings. Believe it or not, the aliens are coming in peace. They even send a coded message down to Dr. Russell Marvin (Hugh Marlowe) as he’s driving through the desert with his wife, Carol (Joan Taylor).

Unfortunately, that turns out to be a mistake because Russell totally fails to decipher the message. The flying saucers land at a local military base and, instead of being greeted in peace, they’re fired upon by a bunch of soldiers. After the aliens vaporize most of the soldiers, they kidnap Russell’s father-in-law (Morris Ankrum) and they send out another message. The citizens of Earth have 56 days to negotiate a surrender or the planet will be destroyed!

It’s now falls to Russell to not only figure out a way to defeat a superior invading force but to also build the weapon that will save Earth. And really, seeing as how this is all his fault, that’s the least that Russell could do.

Despite the campy name and the low-budget, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers actually takes itself fairly seriously. This movie was made at the start of the big UFO boom, when newspapers were still full of stories about people claiming that they had spotted something strange in the air. The legendary Ray Harryhausen based his UFO designs on actual reports of what people claimed that they had seen in the sky. As a result, this is the film that, for many, first solidified the idea of what a flying saucer should look like.

One of the most interesting things about this film is that the aliens, themselves, are rather reasonable. Oh sure, they end up killing a lot of people and trying to destroy the planet but really, it’s all just a big misunderstanding. The aliens came in peace and, even after they get mad, they still give humanity time to negotiate a surrender. Of course, that being said, we still have to blow them out of the sky because they are trying to conquer the world and, as always seemed to happen in 50s sci-fi films, it’s pretty much up to America to do all the work.

Though director Fred Sears keeps the action moving quickly and both Marlowe and Ankrum give good performances in their stock roles as, respectively, the scientist and the military leader, Ray Harryhausen is the real star of this movie. The stop-motion animation special effects are still a lot of fun to watch today. Plus, if you don’t applaud when that flying saucer crashes into the Capitol dome, there may be no hope for you.

Earth vs. The Flying Saucers is one of the better alien invasion films of the 50s. If nothing else, it’s a film that will inspire you to keep watching the skies!

Horror on the Lens: The Little Shop of Horrors (dir by Roger Corman)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

(It’s tradition here at the Lens that, every October, we watch the original Little Shop of Horrors.  And always, I start things off by telling this story…)

Enter singing.

Little Shop…Little Shop of Horrors…Little Shop…Little Shop of Terrors…

Hi!  Good morning and Happy October 24th!  For today’s plunge into the world of public domain horror films, I’d like to present you with a true classic.  From 1960, it’s the original Little Shop of Horrors!

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…

October Positivity: Another Perfect Stranger (dir by Jefferson Moore and Shane Sooter)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Ten years after Nikki Cominskey had the world’s most awkward dinner date with Jesus (played by Jefferson Moore), Nikki’s daughter is flying to Portland.

Having just graduated from high school, Sarah (Ruby Lewis) wants to attend an exclusive art school but she fears that she may not get the scholarship that she would need.  If that wasn’t stressful enough, she’s also not getting along with her parents.  She never thought that her mom and dad were actually seriously about all that church stuff but it turns out that they were and now they are scandalized to discover that Sarah doesn’t even consider herself to be a believer!  The night before Sarah’s trip, Nikki sat her daughter down and told her about the night that she had dinner with Jesus.  Now, Sarah is worried that her mother has lost her mind.

Because Sarah is flying the least efficient airline in existence, there’s a layover in Dallas on the way to Portland.  That leaves Sarah a lot of time to get to know the man who is sitting next to her on the airplane.  His name is Yesh and he says that he comes from a small town in the east.  He also says that he’s a counselor and that he works with his father.  When Sarah asks what Yesh’s father does, Yesh says that it’s not easy to explain but that his father has a lot of responsibility.  He’s in charge of many things.  Sarah thinks that Yesh is a friendly stranger but, since he’s played by Jefferson Moore, the audience knows who he actually is.

Yesh and Sarah discuss religion.  Sarah says she hates religion.  Yesh says that he agrees, because people have twisted religion to satisfy their own base desires.  Sarah says that she can’t understand her parents.  Yesh says that her parents love her just as his father loves everyone.  Sarah says that she wants to be an artist.  Yesh tells her to be sure not to fall asleep during art history class.  (Hold on, Yesh!  I majored in art history!  Art history rocks!)  Sarah assumes that Yesh is an atheist and gets a little annoyed when Yesh reveals that he’s actually not.  Yesh reads her a poem and explains that it was written by his father and that it’s in the Bible.  Sarah is amazed because she thought the Bible was just full of rules.  She doesn’t seem to notice that Yesh said that his father wrote the Bible but that’s because Sarah doesn’t really come across as being that smart.

You can pretty much guess where all of this leading.  With the exception of one surprisingly well-handled scene in which Sarah discusses the trauma that turned her away from religion, Another Perfect Stranger follows the same storyline as The Perfect Stranger.  The main difference is that Sarah is a teenager and the conversation takes place on a plane instead of at a restaurant.  Once again, Yesh wins every argument because the screenwriter is on his side and Sarah is incapable of coming up with any counterpoints that aren’t easily dismissed.  Unfortunately, this film is also 20 minutes longer than The Perfect Stranger and pace is much slower.  The majority of Sarah’s dialogue sounds like it was written by a computer program designed to basically approximate the speaking habits of someone under the age of 30.  On the plus side, Sarah is not quite as humiliated by Jesus as her mother was.

This was followed by one more Perfect Stranger film, which was only 61 minutes long and which I’ll take a look at tomorrow.

The TSL’s Horror Grindhouse: Teenagers From Outer Space (dir by Tom Graeff)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The aliens have landed in California!

And they’re teenagers!

That may sound like the set up of a 1960s beach movie but actually, Teenagers From Outer Space is an oddly somber little movie from 1959.  Now, just to be clear, somber does not necessarily equal good.  There’s a lot of humor to be found in Teenagers From Outer Space but next to none of it’s intentional.  Instead, this attempts to be a serious-minded movie that happens to be about intergalactic teens.

The teenagers are named Thor (Bryan Grant) and Derek (David Love).  They’ve been sent down to Earth so that they can raise Gargons, which are these lobster creatures that are considered to be a gourmet delicacy on their own world.  Thor is the arrogant and insensitive alien who thinks that he’s too good for Earth and reacts to nearly every social situation by pulling out his ray gun and firing.  (Whenever Thor vaporizes anyone, a perfectly white skeleton — the type that you’d expect to see hanging in a classroom — is left behind.)  Derek is sensitive and moody.  He’s got the soul of a poet.  He doesn’t want to vaporize people.  Instead, he wants to explore Earth and maybe hang out in a coffee house while reading Kerouac.  Though Derek may never actually say it, it’s obvious what’s going through his mind whenever he looks at the other teenagers from outer space.  “The scene is totally squaresville, man,” Derek thinks, “Real melvin.  Exploring planets with peaceful intentions is where it’s at!”

Anyway, Derek decides to run away and explore Earth on his own.  He ends up renting a room in a boarding house owned by Grandpa (Harvey B. Dunn) and his daughter, Betty (Dawn Bender).  Betty is immediately attracted to Derek, despite the fact that she already has a boyfriend (who is played by the film’s director, Tom Graeff).  She’s not particularly surprised when Derek tells her that he’s from outer space.  Nor is she upset when he reveals that, shortly after arriving on Earth, Thor vaporized her dog.  (Judging from her nonplussed reactions to everything, I’m assuming that Betty was an avid reader of both Sartre and Camus.)

As for Grandpa, he spends most of his time hanging out on the front porch and talking to strangers.  For instance, when Thor comes by and demands to know where Derek is, Grandpa cheerfully tells him.  This, of course, leads to a lot of innocent people being vaporized but Grandpa never seems to feel particularly bad about it.  Certainly, no one in the movie ever takes the time to point out how much trouble could have been avoided if Grandpa wasn’t so talkative.

Derek really just wants to stay on Earth but Thor knows that Derek is secretly the son of their planet’s leader and therefore, cannot be allowed to run away.  Why doesn’t Derek know this?  I have no idea.  It’s possible the movie explained this turn of events while I was busy wondering why no one seemed to be upset about all the skeletons that were turning up around town.

Anyway, as I said, there aren’t many intentional laughs to be found in Teenagers From Outer Space but there’s plenty of unintentional ones.  Between Betty’s calm acceptance of everything that Derek tells her and David Love’s continually confused stare and blank line readings, it’s impossible not to smile while watching this movie.

Teenagers From Outer Space was written, directed, and produced by Tom Graeff. Shortly after this film came out, Graeff took out an ad in the Los Angeles Times and proclaimed himself to be the second coming of Christ.  Hey, why not?  After you make a movie like Teenagers From Outer Space, I suppose it seems like anything could be possible.  Unfortunately, Graef committed suicide in 1970 and he didn’t get to see his misbegotten little film find a second life as a cult favorite.

Teenagers From Outer Space.  It’s not very good but it certainly is watchable.

Sometimes They Come Back… For More (1998, directed by Daniel Zelik Berk)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The third and final Sometimes They Come Back film has nothing to do with the two films that preceded it.  Those two films dealt with dead juvenile delinquents who came back to life to haunt the people who they blamed for their deaths.  They came back for revenge.  The third film has more in common with The Thing than the other two movies.  If you’re going to make a movie that invites comparisons to The Thing, you better have the goods and unfortunately, this film doesn’t.

Captain Sam Cage (Clayton Rohner) and Major Callie O’Grady (Chase Masterson) are dispatched to an Arctic research center to follow up on reports that one of the researcher has snapped.  For Cage, the mission is personal because his brother-in-law is at the center.  What they discover is that almost all of the research personnel are dead and that Dr. Jennifer Wells (Faith Ford) and Lt. Brian Shebanski (Max Perlich) are the sole survivors.  Someone at the research center had been studying Satanism and that, along with a portal to Hell under the station, leads to trouble.  Soon, the dead are reanimating and stalking the living.

Sometimes They Come Back… For More gets off to a good start with the mystery at the base and a visual emphasis on the harshness of life in Antarctica.  Clayton Rohner appeared in a lot of straight-to-video horror movies and, by the time he made this one, he was a pro at handling bad dialogue.  Once Cage and O’Grady reach the base, the movie starts to go off the rails as the survivors make increasingly poor decisions, Faith Ford struggles to be a believable scientist, and an absurd twist is introduced concerning Cage and his brother-in-law (Damian Chapa).  The movie was obviously influenced by The Thing and Alien but it never duplicates the claustrophobic intensity that made those films work.  Not surprisingly, after this movie, they would not come back.

Sometimes They Come Back… Again (1996, directed by Adam Grossman)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

When Jon Porter was a child, he witnessed the murder of his sister by three delinquents named Tony (Alexis Arquette), Vinnie (Bojesse Christopher), and Sean (Glen Beaudin).  The three thugs would have killed Jon too except that they were electrocuted by an electrical wire in a puddle of water.  Years later, the now adult Jon (Michael Gross) returns to his hometown for the funeral of his mother.  Jon is now a psychologist and has a daughter named Michelle (Hillary Swank).

The death of Jon’s mother was no accident.  Tony has come back to life and Michelle, not knowing that he’s a demon, has a crush on him.  Tony soon brings Vinnie and Sean back to life and they seek revenge on the man who they blame for their deaths.

This straight-to-video sequel to Sometimes They Come Back is slightly better than the first film, mostly because Tony and his gang are more intimidating than the ghost greasers that haunted Tim Matheson and Michelle wanting to date the man that her father killed adds a new wrinkle to the story.  There’s nothing about Hillary Swank’s performance that would make you think she was a future Oscar winner but she is likable and sympathetic.  The member of the cast who make the biggest impression is Jennifer Elise Cox, playing Michelle’s Tarot card-reading friend.  (Cox is probably best known for playing Jan Brady in The Brady Bunch movies.)  Cox brings a lot of kooky charm to the movie and is featured in the film’s most memorable scene.  Sometimes They Come Back… Again may not reinvent the horror genre but it’s a passably entertaining straight-to-video horror film.