Horror Film Review: Jacob’s Ladder (dir by Adrian Lyne)

Posted on October 22, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1990 film Jacob’s Ladder asks the question, “Who is Jacob Singer?”

Is Jacob (played by Tim Robbins), a soldier serving in Vietnam who has just been severely wounded in an enemy attack and who is now barely clinging to life in a helicopter?

Is Jacob a withdrawn postal worker who lives in 1970s New York with his girlfriend, Jezzie (Elizabeth Pena), and who is haunted by horrifying visions of faceless, vibrating figures and viscous demons? This Jacob is haunted by ill-defined past incidents. Whenever he gets depressed, Jezzie is quick to demand that he snap out of it and that he stop thinking about anything other than the present day. This Jacob can only watch as all of his old friends either sink into paranoia or die. He hears rumors that they all may have been part of some sort of experiment involving LSD. He’s sure that he served in the army but when he attempts to hire an attorney, he’s informed that the army has no record of him ever having served in combat and that they say he was discharged for psychological reasons.

Or is Jacob the husband of Sarah (Patricia Kalember) and the father of Gabe (Macaulay Culkin — yes, that Culkin)? This is the Jacob who occasionally wakes up in bed with his wife and tells her that he’s been having the weirdest dream, one where he was living with “that crazy woman” from the post office, Jezebel?

Which one of these three realities is the truth for Jacob? At times, Jacob himself doesn’t even seem to be sure. Perhaps the one thing that you can be sure about in this movie is that whenever Jacob closes his eyes, he’s going to reopen them and discover that he’s in a different time and place. Jacob spends almost the entire film trying to work out what’s happening in the present, what’s happening in the past, and what’s just happening in his head.

And, to be honest, it all gets a bit pretentious at times. The film’s script has a lot on its mind. In fact, it might have a little bit too much going on. No sooner have you soaked in what the film has to say about denial and acceptance than you’re suddenly getting a crash course in MK-ULTRA and other mind-control conspiracy theories. Whenever Jacob isn’t seeing demons and faceless apparitions, he’s being kidnapped by government agents. There’s so much going on that this film can get a bit exhausting.

Fortunately, the film itself is such a triumph of style that it doesn’t matter that the script is a bit of a mess. Director Adrian Lyne does a great job bringing Jacob’s nightmarish world to life. Jacob seems to live in a world where the skies are permanently overcast and the streets are always wet after a recent storm. When Jacob makes the mistake of walking down a subway tunnel, Lyne frames it as if Jacob is literally following a tunnel into Hell. When a subway train rushes by Jacob, we catch disturbing glimpses of featureless faces facing the windows. When Jacob sees a demon at a party, Lynne films the moment so that, just like Jacob, it takes us a few minutes to realize what we’re seeing. And when Jacob is kidnapped and taken to a Hellish hospital, the scene is nightmarish in its intensity.

Tim Robbins gives a great performance as the emotionally withdrawn and haunted Jacob. (In fact, he’s so good that it makes it all the more sad that he really hasn’t had a decent role since he won an Oscar for 2003’s Mystic River.) He’s matched by Elizabeth Pena, who constantly keeps you wondering if Jezzie truly cares about Jacob or if she’s just another part of the conspiracy that seems to have taken over his life.

Jacob’s Ladder is an intensely effective, if somewhat messy, horror film. Apparently, like almost every other horror film released in the 20th century, it’s currently being remade, with the remake due to released on February 9th. Just in time for Valentine’s Day!

Horror Film Review: Ghost Ship (dir by Steve Beck)

Posted on October 22, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Way back when we first started this year’s horrorthon, Arleigh shared a horror scene that he loved. That scene was the opening few minutes of the 2002 horror-at-sea film, Ghost Ship.

That scene featured a few dozen wealthy cruise ship passengers all getting bisected by a thin wire cord. While a young girl named Kate (Emily Browning) watches, everyone on the ship’s dance floor literally falls to pieces. Torsos slip off of legs. Bodies split in half. The captain’s head literally splits in two. While gallons of blood gush everywhere, people vainly try to reattach their limbs. Actually, some of them can’t even figure out which limb belongs to them. By the time everyone’s collapsed, there’s a lot of arms and legs to sort through.

In short, it’s an absolute mess. I wouldn’t want to be the person assigned to clean up after all that.

It’s also a rather brilliant opening, one that only takes a minute to go from romance and sophistication to bloody dismemberment. It’s definitely the one moment that everyone remembers about Ghost Ship, which is a bit of a problem because, once that scene is done, there’s still 85 minutes of film to sit through. Ghost Ship‘s opening is so shocking and visceral that there’s no way that the rest of the film can live up to it.

As for the rest of the film, it deals with a boat salvage crew. Gabriel Byrne is Murphy, the captain. Julianne Margulies is Maureen Epps, whose name might as well be Ellen Ripley. Ron Eldard is Dodge, who is in love with Epps. And then there’s Karl Urban, Isiah Washington, and Alex Dimitriades, who are all playing characters who you know are going to be doomed as soon as you see them. When they’re told by a pilot named Jack Ferriman (Desmond Harrington) that he’s spotted a ghost ship in international waters, they set out to claim it for themselves.

Of course, what Jack has spotted is the same cruise ship where, forty years before, everyone was chopped in half. After Murphy, Epps, and the crew board the ship, they discover a large amount of gold. They also end up seeing a lot of ghosts, including the young girl from the start of the movie. To their credit, the crew decides to leave the ship as quickly as they can. Unfortunately, after their tugboat explodes, escape appears to be impossible and it becomes obvious that they have been lured to the cruise ship for a very specific purpose.

The film encourages us to wonder what the ship wants from the salvage crew but the answer to that question is never really in doubt. For that matter, it’s not really a shock when it turns out that one member of the boarding party isn’t what he claims to be. Despite being a bit predictable, Ghost Ship isn’t a bad film. It has a reputation for being disappointing but actually it’s an atmospheric and competently directed horror film. Though the characters are all thinly drawn, the talented cast does their best to try to bring them to life. If the film ultimately doesn’t seem to work as well as it should, it’s largely because nothing that follows can match the power of that opening. You watching the film waiting for a scene that’ll match that opening scene and when it never comes, it’s hard not to be disappointed.

Linda Blair In Oz: Fatal Bond (1992, directed by Vince Monton)

Posted on October 22, 2018 by Jedadiah Leland

Fatal Bond is another Australian exploitation flick starring Linda Blair.

In this one, Linda plays a hairdresser named Leonie. When a drifter named Joe (Jerome Ehlers) crashes a birthday party that Leonie’s attending, it’s lust at first sight. Even though Joe is a violent womanizer who steals milk and headbutts anyone who looks at him crossly, Leonie still takes him home with her. Soon, Joe is crashing in Leonie’s bedroom and Leonie is providing Joe with an alibi whenever the police come looking for him. (Joe says that he has a lot of parking tickets.) When one of Joe’s one night stands turns up dead, Leonie starts to suspect that Joe might be responsible.

Like Dead Sleep, Fatal Bond features Linda Blair as an American who lives in Australia and who has bad taste in men. While Linda Blair has never been a great actress, she’s almost always brings grit, determination, and a will to survive to her roles. Unfortunately, none of that is on display in Fatal Bond, where she’s such a pushover that she lets Joe take over her life. There’s not really much to the whole serial killer storyline either, especially not when the murderer’s identity will be obvious to anyone watching. There’s also another subplot in the movie about Joe searching for his brother, who has gone missing. Fatal Bond doesn’t know if it’s a Linda Blair thriller or a standard Australian crime film.

Don’t be fooled by the sexy cover art. I love a good Linda Blair movie but Fatal Bond was just boring. If you do see the film, keep an eye out for Joe Bugner, the former heavyweight boxer who once fought Muhammad Ali. Bugner has a small role as a lowlife criminal in Fatal Bond. His partner-in-crime is Mel’s younger brother, Donal Gibson, stepping into a role that was originally earmarked for Russell Crowe.

Halloween Havoc!: JUNGLE WOMAN (Universal 1944)

Posted on October 22, 2018 by gary loggins

cracked rear viewer

Paula Dupree, the Ape Woman of CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN , returned in a sequel titled JUNGLE WOMAN a year later. While the former film has a kind of goofy charm to it, the sequel is a wretched concoction that’s not worth the time it’ll take me to write this – but I’m gonna do it anyway, so bear with me!

JUNGLE WOMAN is the very definition of a ‘quickie’, and I don’t mean that in a good way. A good chunk of the film is made up of stock footage from the original, including the stock footage that film used from Clyde Beatty’s THE BIG CAGE. Even so, it took three screenwriters to come up with this nonsense! The movie starts out okay, with a female fiend attacking a man, who gives her an injection, shown in shadow. But it quickly bogs down as we’re at a coroner’s inquest, with…

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Playing Catch-Up With The Films of 2018: The 15:17 To Paris (dir by Clint Eastwood)

Posted on October 22, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

As we all know, October is the month when we usually ignore everything but the horror genre here at the Shattered Lens. However, I’m going to briefly interrupt our horrorthon to say a few words about The 15:17 to Paris.

Directed by Clint Eastwood, The 15:17 to Paris is a film about the 2015 Thalys train attack. This was when a terrorist named Ayoub El Khazzani opened fire on a train that was heading from Amsterdam to Paris. He wounded three passengers and probably would have killed countless more (there were over 500 people on the train) if he had not been subdued by three American friends, one British passenger, and a French train driver. The 15:17 to Paris focuses on the three Americans, Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler, and Alex Skarlatos.

When the film was released on February 9th, it got middling reviews and was considered to be a box office disappointment. Myself, I saw it the first week of March, just a few days before Jeff and I left for a two-week stay in the UK. I meant to review it when we returned to America but I just never got around to it. However, about a week ago the film made its cable debut and seeing as how Clint Eastwood has a second film coming out this year that might be the Oscar contender that his first film probably won’t be, I figured now is as good a time as any to defend The 15:17 To Paris.

Now, don’t get me wrong. The 15:17 to Paris is not a great film by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, the film’s first line of dialogue — in which Anthony Sadler, in voice over, says that he knows we’re probably wondering why “a brother like me” is hanging out with two white guys — made me cringe so hard that I was worried I might sink into my seat and never be able to escape. Sadler, Spencer Stone, and Alex Skarlatos all play themselves in the movie and none of them comes across as being a natural actor. They may be heroes but they aren’t movie stars.

And yet, the fact that none of them are stars is also the film’s greatest strength. Throughout the film, Eastwood emphasizes how totally and completely average Sadler, Skarlatos, and Stone are. None of them really get the type of “hero shots” that one normally expects to see in a film like this. Instead, Eastwood continually reminds us that they’re just three friends who happened to be on the train when the shooting started. They put their own lives at risk to take the shooter down and they also provided first aid to a man who had been shot. Whether they have movie star charisma or not, they still saved countless lives. The film’s point is that you don’t have to be Chris Pratt or Chris Evans to be a hero. You can just be Chris from across the street. You just have to be someone willing to do the right thing at the right time. It’s a sincere and heartfelt message and it’s one that comes across specifically because Eastwood cast three nonprofessionals.

The film starts with a lengthy sequence that depicts the childhoods of the three lifelong friends. It’s kind of a strange sequence, largely because almost all of the supporting roles are filled by talented actors who are best known for their comedic work on television. Thomas Lennon plays a high school principal while Tony Hale shows up as a coach. Even Jaleel White (!) has a role as a teacher who gives the boys advice on self-defense. When the childhood scenes work, it’s largely due to the performances of Jenna Fischer and Judy Greer, who plays the mothers of Alex and Spencer. But whenever Fischer and Greer aren’t around, the childhood scenes are a bit too slow and awkward.

However, once Sadler, Skarlatos, and Stone are on that train, the film definitely picks up. Whatever awkwardness that the three nonprofessionals may have exhibited earlier in the movie disappears as they spring to action and they recreate their responses to the attack on the train. It’s here that Eastwood’s no-nonsense approach to storytelling definitely pays off, as he recreates the train attack without any of the showy tricks that you might expect from other directors. Instead, Eastwood allows things to play-out naturally. Like the passengers on that train, all we can do is watched as the three men rush the gunman.

The 15:17 to Paris may not be one of Eastwood’s best films but it’s hardly the disaster that it was made out to be. Instead, it’s a sincere and unapologetically old-fashioned celebration of heroism and doing the right thing.

Horror on the Lens: Tormented (dir by Bert I. Gordon)

Posted on October 22, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Halloween is the perfect time for a good ghost story and, with that in mind, here is today’s movie.

Released in 1960 and directed by Bert I. Gordon, Tormented tells the sad story of Tom Stewart (Richard Carlson). Now, Tom might look like a pretty regular guy but we know that he’s a little bit crazy because he’s a jazz pianist and you know how dangerous those beatnik-types are. Tom is happily engaged to Meg but one day, his ex-girlfriend Vi shows up. Vi is obsessed with Tom and swear that she’s going to end his engagement.

So, naturally enough, Tom throws her off of a lighthouse.

Problem solved, right?

Not quite. Vi may be dead but she’s not out of Tom’s life. Instead, her disembodied head tends to pop up at random moments and taunt Tom. Meanwhile, Tom is having to deal with Meg’s suspicious sister and a beatnik (Joe Turkel, who years later played Lloyd the Bartender in The Shining) who is determined to collect the $5 that he claims Vi owes him.

Between the beatniks and the raging ocean and the disembodied head popping up whenever it’s least convenient, Tormented is a lot of fun and the perfect film for some retro Halloween fun.

Going There: Bad Blood (1989, directed by Chuck Vincent)

Posted on October 21, 2018 by Jedadiah Leland

Oh man, this is a twisted movie.

Yuppie lawyer Ted (adult film actor Randy Spears, credited here as Gregory Patrick) is shocked when he sees a painting of a man who looks just like him. He is told that the portrait was painted in 1964 and that the man in the painting is the late husband of the artist, Arlene (porn legend Georgina Spelvin, credited here at Ruth Raymond). Arlene goes on to reveal that Ted is actually her long-lost son and then she invites him and his wife, Evie (Linda Blair, credited here as Linda Blair), to come out to her mansion. What Ted doesn’t realize is that Arlene believes that he is actually her husband reincarnated and she is planning on doing away with Evie so that she can have her son all to herself and do what it is she wants to do with him. Yes, this film goes there.

Chuck Vincent was one of the leading directors of the Golden Age of Porn. Unlike most other adult film directors, his movies were popular with not only the public but also with critics. (His best-known film, Roommates, received a rave in the New York Times.) In the 80s, Vincent tried to make the move into mainstream film, mostly directing sex comedies and dopey thrillers. Most of his mainstream films featured adult performers in dramatic roles, which made them very popular on late night cable.

Bad Blood feels like a combination of Fatal Attraction and Misery. There’s even a scene where Arlene ties up her son in bed and then breaks his toes to keep him from leaving. (Bad Blood, though, came out a year before Rob Reiner’s film so the resemblance is probably a coincidence.) Spelvin, who was widely regarded as being the best actress to ever regularly appear in pornographic movies, gives a great, demented performance as Arlene and Linda Blair is also good as Evie. Chuck Vincent was a good director, even when he was doing schlocky straight-to-video stuff like this. Perhaps because of his background in adult films, Vincent never hesitated about taking his films to the places where other directors would be scared to tread. Sadly, Vincent died in 1991 and most of his movies have fallen into obscurity.

Halloween Havoc!: SON OF DRACULA (Universal 1943)

Posted on October 21, 2018 by gary loggins

cracked rear viewer

Director Robert Siodmak is remembered today for his dark excursions into the world of film noir: THE SUSPECT, THE KILLERS , CRY OF THE CITY, CRISS CROSS . His first entry in the genre is generally recognized as 1944’s PHANTOM LADY , but a case could be made for SON OF DRACULA, Siodmak’s only Universal Horror that combines elements of both genres into what could best be described as supernatural noir.

A train pulls into the station in a sleepy Louisiana town. Frank Stanley (Robert Paige) and Dr. Brewster (Frank Craven ) are there to meet Count Alucard, invited for a visit by Kay Caldwell (Louise Albritton), Frank’s fiancé, who has long been interested in the occult. Alucard isn’t aboard, but his trunks are, and Brewster notices Alucard spelled backwards reads as Dracula. The trunks are delivered to Kay’s family plantation, Dark Oaks. The scene shifts, and…

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Horror On The Lens: Silent Night, Bloody Night (dir by Theodore Gershuny)

Posted on October 21, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1974 film Silent Night, Bloody Night is an oddity.

On the one hand, it’s pretty much a standard slasher film, complete with a menacing mansion, a horrible secret, a twist ending, and John Carradine playing a mute newspaper editor.

On the other hand, director Ted Gershuny directs like he’s making an underground art film and several of the supporting roles are played by actors who were best known for their association with Andy Warhol.

Personally, I like Silent Night, Bloody Night. It has a terrible reputation and the film’s star, Mary Woronov, has gone on record calling it a “terrible movie” but I like the surreal touches the Gershuny brought to the material and the sepia-toned flashbacks have a nightmarish intensity to them. The film makes no logical sense, which actually makes it all the more appealing to me. As the saying goes, your mileage may vary.

Watch and decide for yourself!

The TSL’s Horror Grindhouse: Humanoids from the Deep (dir by Barbara Peeters)

Posted on October 20, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Some people really hate clowns.

Myself, I really hate ventriloquist’s dummies.

Seriously, those little wooden things totally freak me out. You know how some of you feel about the painted smile on the clowns ‘face? Well, that’s how I feel whenever I see the big eyes of a ventriloquist dummy or that mouth with the fake teeth. And don’t even get me started on those tiny little legs that some of them have! AGCK!

I mention this because there is a ventriloquist’s dummy in the 1980 film, Humanoids From The Deep. There’s really no reason for it to be in the film but suddenly, out of nowhere, there it is. It belongs to a teenager named Billy who, when we first see him, is relaxing in a tent on the beach, trying to get his girlfriend to undress for him and the dummy. Of course, they’re promptly interrupted by a seaweed-covered monster, who rips open the tent, kills Billy, and chases after his girlfriend. The whole time, the dummy watches with a somewhat quizzical expression on his face. It’s a strange scene.

Now, I’ve done some research and I’ve discovered that Billy was played by David Strassman, who was (and still is) a professional ventriloquist and his dummy was named …. I do not kid …. Chuck Wood. So, the whole tent scene was kind of a celebrity cameo. Roger Corman, who produced the film, said, “You know what? This movie has blood, nudity, killer fish-men, and rampant misogyny but it’s still missing something! How about that ventriloquist that I saw on the Tonight Show last night!?”

Anyway, Humanoids From The Deep is basically about what happens when you try to mutate salmon. You end up with a bunch of pervy fish monsters swarming the beach and trying to make like human/fish babies. You end up with a lot of dead teens and unplanned pregnancies. You also end up with the local redneck fisherman (led by Vic Morrow) blaming the local Native Americans, accusing them of killing all of the dogs in town. Jim Hill (Doug McClure) and his wife, Carol (Cindy Weintraub), try to keep the peace but their efforts are continually tripped up by the fact that almost everyone in town is an idiot.

For instance, despite the fact that there’s been a countless number of murders and rapes and that they’ve all been committed a group of monsters that nobody knows how to fight, the town still decides to hold their annual festival on the pier. Of course, as soon as the obnoxious DJ starts broadcasting, the humanoids from the deep show up and basically, the entire festival goes to Hell. And here’s the thing. The film itself is ugly and mean-spirited and misogynistic but the attack on the festival is totally and completely brilliant. I mean, it’s one of the greatest monster sieges of all time, largely because the monsters are apparently unstoppable and that humans are so obnoxious that you don’t mind seeing them all die. I mean, if nothing else, the monster deserve some credit for taking out that DJ.

It all leads to a “surprise” ending, which isn’t particularly surprising but which is so batshit insane that it somehow seems appropriate.

Humanoids From The Deep is an incredibly icky movie, one that has some effective scare scenes but which is way too misogynistic to really be much fun. (Roger Corman hired Barbara Peeters to direct the film but reportedly brought in a male director to film the movie’s more explicit scenes.) Oh well. At least the ventriloquist died.