For the crime of having murdered over a 100 people, “Meat Cleaver Max” Jenke (Brion James) is sentenced to death and sent to the electric chair. Even though everyone thinks that Max was electrocuted, his electricity-fueled spirit is still alive and pissed off. If this sounds familiar, that is because it is the exact same premise that was used in Destroyer. The only difference is that Max is not haunting a prison and killing a film crew. Instead, he is living in a basement and seeking revenge on Lucas McCarthy (Lance Henriksen), the cop who arrested him.
Lucas is already tightly wound. There is a scene where Lucas is watching as his family laughs uproariously at a late night comic who is telling a not very funny joke about then-Vice President Dan Quayle. When Lucas thinks that he sees Max on TV, he pulls out his gun and shoots the screen. His wife, son, and daughter will probably never laugh at another joke about any vice president. Soon, Lucas is seeing and hearing Max everywhere. Max says that he is going to tear Lucas’s world apart and he means it.
That The Horror Show is going to be a mess is obvious from the opening credits, where the screenplay is credited to Alan Smithee. The credited director is visual effects specialist James Isaac but most of the film was reportedly directed by David Blythe. Isaac stepped in when Blythe was fired by producer Sean S. Cunningham. Full of false scares and scenes where people go down into the basement for no reason other than to become Max’s latest victim, The Horror Show is usually boring, except for when it is violent, gory, and mean-spirited. There are moments of strange attempts at humor that do not seem to belong. In the middle of all the carnage, there is a subplot about McCarthy’s son (Aron Eisenberg) ordering case after case of Nestle Quick. Did Nestle pay for the product placement? Were they happy to be associated with a movie where Lance Henriksen has a nightmare that his daughter (played by DeeDee “sister of Michelle” Pfieffer) is pregnant with Max Jenke’s baby?
The Horror Show provided both Lance Henriksen and Brion James with rare starring roles and they did their best what they had to work with. Also keep an eye out for veteran tough guy Lawrence Tierney as the warden who supervises Max’s execution.
Today’s horror scene that I love comes from the absolutely terrifying 1922 silent film, Nosferatu.
Directed by F. W. Murnau and featuring Max Schreck as Count Orlock, Nosferatu is often cited as being the first vampire film. That’s actually not true. There were apparently film adaptations of Dracula that were produced years before Murnau gave the world his “unauthorized” adaptation.
However, I do think it can be argued that Nosferatu is the most influential vampire film ever made. Every vampire movie released over the past 95 years has been a direct descendant of Nosferatu and it remains a truly nightmarish work of horror art. One need only compare it to Universal’s first Draculafilm to see how well Nosferatu has aged.
It’s a legitimate question. Alien itself is such an iconic horror film that, 38 years after it was first released, blatant rip-offs like Life are still being produced and, in many case, are still doing pretty well at the box office. When John Hurt died earlier this year, he left behind a long and distinguished filmography but almost every obituary opened by discussing his role in Alien.
Alien: Covenant received a good deal of pre-release publicity, mostly centering on the fact that Ridley Scott was not only the filming the latest installment of the franchise but that this was going to be a true Alien film, as opposed to a strange hybrid like Prometheus. Personally, when I first saw the trailer, I thought it looked like something was a little off about it. The spaceship looked way too clean and, for that matter, so did all the humans. Whereas Alien and Aliens were all about sweaty, profane men and women stuck in dark and cramped locations, the humans in Alien: Covenant just looked too damn perky. In at least one of the trailers, they were all smiling. No one smiles in space, at least not in an Alien movie. Still, everyone else seemed to be super excited about the trailer so I figured that maybe I was just being overly critical.
Then the movie came out. It got some respectful but somewhat restrained reviews, though it did seem like quite a few critics were more interested in praising the longevity of the series as opposed to actually talking about the film itself. At the box office, it performed a bit below expectations during the first week but then again, that’s pretty much been the story for almost every film that’s been released in 2017. But then, during the second week, it plunged from being the number one movie in America to being the number four movie in America. In the third week, it plunged again and, in the fourth week, it left first-run theaters and headed for the dollar cinemas. When a widely anticipated film like that — especially one that is part of a historically popular franchise — heads to purgatory after only four weeks, the only thing you can blame is word of mouth.
Why did Alien: Covenant fail?
Well, there’s several reasons why this film failed to connect with audiences.
First off, the plot is rather familiar. In the future, the crew of a spaceship picks up a radio transmission for a nearby planet and the captain (played, in this case, by Billy Crudup) sends down an expedition to investigate. Of course, it turns out that the planet is full of facehuggers and xenomorphs and all the other stuff that audiences typically expect from an Alien film. Also on the planet is David (Michael Fassbender), the replicant who is the sole survivor from Prometheus. (Fassbender actually plays two roles in Covenant. He also plays Walter, another replicant. One is bad and one is good.) Basically, Covenant takes the plots of Alien and Aliens and mashes them together. But it never answers the question of why audiences wouldn’t be better off just watching the originals.
The humans themselves are rather blandly written and somewhat interchangeable. There’s no one who is memorably quirky like Bill Paxton or Harry Dean Stanton. Katherine Waterston makes for a bland substitute for both Sigourney Weaver and Noomi Rapace. Usually, I like Danny McBride but he seems out of place in an Alien film. Genuinely interesting actors, like James Franco, Amy Seimetz, and Carmen Ejogo, are all dispatched far too early. Probably the best performance in the film comes from Michael Fassbender but, for anyone who has any knowledge of what usually happens with replicants in the Alien franchise, there’s no surprises to be found in either of his characters.
But ultimately, the main problem with Alien: Covenant is that it just wasn’t scary. Some might say that this is due to the fact that we’re no longer shocked by the sight of aliens bursting out of people’s chests. However, I recently watched Alien. I watched it with the full knowledge that, as soon as John Hurt sat down to eat, that little bugger was going to burst out of his chest and that blood and bones were going to fly everywhere. I also knew that Harry Dean Stanton was going to end up walking right underneath the alien. I knew that Tom Skerritt’s radio was going to go dead. I knew that the alien would be waiting for Sigourney Weaver in the escape pod. I knew all of this and Alien still scared the Hell out of me, as it has every time that I’ve watched it.
And I also had the same reaction when I recently watched Aliens. Yes, I knew that the space marines weren’t going to be able to fight the aliens. I knew what was going to happen to Paul Reiser. I knew that Bill Paxton was going to end up chanting, “Game over, man!” I knew that aliens were going to be bursting off of chests all over the place. I knew it was all going to happen and yet, turning out all the lights and watching Aliens still left me feeling shaken.
The difference between those two films and Alien: Covenant is that the first two films felt authentic. The ships felt lived in. The characters felt real. Both films were full of rough edges and small details that invited you to try to look closer. You could watch those films and imagine yourself on those ships and talking to those characters. You got scared because you knew that there was no way you’d be one of the survivors. Everyone pretends that they would be Sigourney Weaver but most of us know that, in reality, we’re going to be Veronica Cartwright, sobbing and useless.
Alien: Covenant, on the other hand, is a very slick movie. Nothing about it feels real and there’s no real emotional impact when the aliens show up and start killing people. You never feel as if you know the characters, beyond whatever feelings you may have toward the actors involved. “Oh,” you say, “the alien just burst out of Billy Crudup’s chest. Well, he’s got another movie coming out so he’ll be fine…”
For all of the technical skill that went into making it, Alien: Covenant has no soul. And, for that reason, it’s never scary. (Sadly, Life felt like a better Alien movie than Covenant did.) Hopefully, if there is another Alien film, that soul will be rediscovered.
Though it’s been a while since we last did so, we occasionally like to share old educational and promotional films here at the Shattered Lens. For some reason, we always seem to end up sharing quite a lot of them in October. Something about the over-the-top educational format just tends to bring out the ghoulish melodrama in some aspiring filmmakers.
Take Case Study: LSD, for instance! This 3 and a half minute film is from 1969. It was made to dissuade viewers from experimenting with LSD but I get the feeling that I probably just mostly inspired people to try to recreate the infamous hot dog scene.
It’s a good film for October, though. Plus, I like looking at all the hippies in their hippie clothes. GET A HAIRCUT, YOU HIPPIES!
Believe it or not, Case Study: LSD has a page over at the IMDb but no director is listed. Judging from the film’s use of still frames, I’m going to guess that it was directed by Chris Marker.
For today’s horror on the lens, how about a little werwolf action?
In the 1974 made-for-TV movie, Scream of the Wolf, Peter Graves is a writer who is asked to help solve a series of mysterious murders. The fact that both human footprints and wolf tracks have been found at each murder scene has led some people to assume that the killer must be a werewolf! Will Graves be able to prove them wrong or will it turn out that they are right? Graves calls in a famous hunter (Clint Walker) to help track down the killer but it turns out that the hunter has secrets of his own.
I’m going to guess that, like Baffled!, Scream of the Wolf was a pilot disguised a movie. I assume that the hope was that the movie would lead to a series where Peter Graves would solve a different paranormal mystery every week.
Well, that series never materialized by Scream of the Wolf is still an enjoyable film. The screenplay was by none other than Richard Matheson while made-for-TV horror specialist Dan Curtis sat in the director’s chair.
In the end, Scream of the Wolf is only 72 minutes long and I know for a fact that you don’t have anything better to do right now. I watched this movie two months ago with Patrick Smith and the Late Night Movie Gang and we had a blast.
Listen, as someone who loves Italian horror and who feels that Lucio Fulci made some of the best (if most misunderstood) horror films of all time, I certainly wish A Cat In The Brain was a great film. Every time I watch it, I find myself hoping that it will turn out to be better than I know it’s going to be. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t necessarily think that A Cat In the Brain was a terrible film. Especially when compared to some of the other films that Fulci directed towards the end of his career, A Cat In The Brain is competently made and it certainly proves that Fulci had a better sense of humor than many critics give him credit for. It’s not really a bad film. It’s just a disappointing one.
To understand why, you have to understand just who Lucio Fulci was and why horror fans hold him in such high regard. Fulci was an Italian director, one who was responsible for some of the most visually impressive horror films of all time. Even though Fulci did not start his career working in the horror genre, it’s those films that for which he is best remembered. Many of his films, like Zombi 2, City of the Living Dead, The House By The Cemetery, and The Beyond, are rightfully remembered as classics. By design, these movies often felt like filmed nightmares and they remain influential to this very day. Literally every zombie film that has been released over the past few decades owes a debt to Fulci and The Beyond trilogy is perhaps as close as any director has ever gotten to truly capturing the feel of H.P. Lovecraft on film.
Unfortunately, many critics refuses to look past the violent content of Fulci’s films. In some countries, his movies were banned outright. In America, Fulci’s masterpiece, The Beyond, was released in a butchered, compromised form. Following the release of his controversial and disturbing slasher film, The New York Ripper,Fulci’s career went into decline and, suffering from ill-health and often in desperate need of money, he found himself directing low-budget films that were unworthy of his considerable talents. It’s one of the sadder stories in the history of Italian horror.
A Cat In The Brain was one of Fulci’s final films and it stars none other than … Lucio Fulci! Fulci plays a horror director named Lucio Fulci. Fulci is concerned that all of his recent work in the horror genre is starting to mentally damage him. For instance, after editing a scene about cannibalism, Fulci goes to a nearby restaurant and orders a steak. However, whenever he starts to eat his steak, Fulci flashes back to the movie that he’s just directed. When he goes home, the sound of the handyman using a chainsaw causes Fulci to think about a scene that he filmed, one that involved a killer chopping up a body. When a frustrated Fulci kicks a bucket of red paint, he visualizes blood. Meeting a German reporter causes Fulci to fantasize about a Nazi orgy. Is Fulci losing it? Could it be that violent movies really do cause violent urges?
Worried about his mental health, Fulci goes to see a psychiatrist, Professor Egon Schwarz (David L. Thompson). Schwarz puts Fulci order hypnosis and tells Fulci that, over the next few weeks, he will think that he has “done terrible things.” It turns out that Professor Schwarz is an aspiring serial killer. Schwarz wants to go on a killing spree and have Lucio Fulci take responsibility for it…
To be honest, the plot description probably makes A Cat In The Brain sound like it’s a lot more subversive than it actually is. It has all the ingredients to be a great satire but, unfortunately, Fulci’s heart never seems to really be in the movie. Oddly, considering that the movie is literally about his life, Fulci directs A Cat In The Brain in a rather detached and clinical fashion. There’s none of the visual poetry that distinguished Fulci’s best work.
Even worse, probably over half of this film is made up of clips that were lifted from other Fulci films. Unfortunately, the scenes don’t come from Fulci’s good films. Don’t go into A Cat In The Brain expecting to see anything from Zombi 2 or Don’t Torture A Duckling. Instead, all of the clips come from stuff like Touch of Death and The Ghosts of Sodom, films that largely represent Lucio Fulci’s declining years.
However, there is one good thing about A Cat In the Brain (beyond the title, which I think is adorable): the film ends with Fulci happy and literally sailing into the sunset. Considering both Fulci’s lasting influence as a filmmaker and the sad details of his final years, it’s hard not to feel that A Cat In The Brain gave Fulci the final scene that this talented director deserved.
There are a lot of negative things that you can say about 2017. In the future, when historians look back of the second decade of the 21st century, I imagine that they will point to 2017 as being one of the worst years in American history. The country is divided. The world seems like a scary and dangerous place. The outlook for the future feels bleak. It’s not so much that people are angry. Instead, it’s that there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight for all the anger. It’s difficult to imagine that the differences that currently divide the world are ever going to be resolved.
However, there is one thing that can be said about 2017. It’s been a very good year for horror cinema.
Sure, there have been a few less-than-perfect films. Rings left most people disappointed. Does anyone remember The Bye Bye Man or have we said farewell to the memories of that unfortunate film? While The Dark Tower was never specifically a horror movie, it’s still not easy to think of any other Stephen King adaptation that has been greeted with such indifference. The less said about Tom Cruise’s The Mummy, the better.
But even with all that in mind, there have been some truly outstanding horror movies released this year. Movies like Get Out, It, and The Belko Experiment will be well-remembered long after the more “traditional” films of 2017 have faded from the collective memory. I would go as far as to argue that David Lynch’s revival of Twin Peaks should itself be considered an 18-hour horror movie. Maybe it is because the world seems like such a dark place right now. Maybe, at this point, horror movies are the only movies that accurately reflect the way many people are feeling about the present and the future. For whatever reason, 2017 has been a great year for horror.
Really, we wouldn’t be surprised. Way back in January, things got off to a good start with the release of Split. Split was a film that not many people were expecting to be impressive. Just consider: the film was coming out in January, which is when the worst films are usually released. (The theory is that everyone’s too busy with the Oscars to notice that studios are desperately trying to write off all of the losers that they misguidedly greenlit for production the previous year.) Split was directed by M. Night Shyamalan, a formerly respected director whose last few films had been disappointing. Finally, the film’s plot just didn’t sound that good: James McAvoy plays a man with multiple personalities who kidnaps three teenage girls (Anya Taylor-Joy, Haley Lu Richardson, and Jessica Sula) and holds them captive. Throughout the film, McAvoy cycles through his different personalities and the girls try to find a way to escape before McAvoy turns into the Beast.
And yet somehow, Split works. It’s a genuinely scary and unsettling film, one that left me feeling paranoid for days after I watched it. From the minute that the film started, it grabbed hold of me and it did not let go for two hours. I watched the movie and I wondered what would happen if I ever found myself in the same situation as the kidnapped girls. Would I be able to survive? Would I be able to escape? Or would I just be another victim of the Beast? It’s a deeply frightening film, one that feels like a waking nightmare at its most intense.
Obviously, a lot of credit has to go to James McAvoy, who is brilliant in a role that would have brought out the worst instincts in a lesser actor. It’s a showy role and there had to be considerable temptation to go overboard. And there are a few times when McAvoy embraces the more theatrical possibilities of the role. However, in his best scenes, McAvoy is surprisingly subtle. Yes, he does a lot of different voices. Yes, his body language alters from personality to personality. But McAvoy is at his best when he just allows his facial expression to subtly suggest that he has turned into someone else. McAvoy is frightening but, at times, he’s also rather pathetic. Whenever McAvoy shows up, you never know what he’s going to do. He keeps you off-balance.
As good as McAvoy is, M. Night Shyamalan also deserves a lot of credit for Split. For a film about a man with 23 warring personalities, Split is refreshingly direct and straight forward. There’s none of the cloying cleverness that cheapened some of Shyamalan’s other films. Instead, Split is simply a good, scary film for a really scary world.
A year and a half ago, serial killer Ivan Mosser (Lyle Alzado) was sent to the electric chair for murdering 23 people. On the night that he was electrocuted, the worst prison riot in American history broke out. The prison was closed and abandoned. A year and a half later, a film crew has entered the prison to make a women in prison film. Robert Edwards (Anthony Perkins) is the sleazy director. David Harris (Clayton Rohner) is the screenwriter who fights to maintain the integrity of his script and who is an expert on the prison’s history. Susan Malone (Deborah Foreman) is a stuntwoman and David’s girlfriend. And Ivan is the murderer who is still half-alive and full of electricity.
Watching a forgettable, direct-to-video movie like Destroyer, it is impossible not to feel sorry for Anthony Perkins, who went from getting nominated from Oscars and working with Hitchcock to appearing in films like this. According to the Perkins biography, Split Image, Perkins was brought in at the last minute to replace Roddy McDowall and was miserable during most of the shoot. Since Perkins spent a good deal of his later career working with directors like the one he plays in Destroyer, it’s not surprising that he gives one of the two good performances in Destroyer and he also gets the movie’s only memorable death scene. The other good performance comes from Lyle Alzado, a former football player who had exactly the right look for his role and who plays Ivan like a ghost who is in the throes of roid rage. Unfortunately, both Alzado and Perkins would die within months of each other in 1992, four years after co-starring in Destroyer.
Today’s horror scene that I love is, much like The Haunted Castle and The Monster, less a scene and more an entire movie.
In 1910, Thomas Edison produced what is thought to be the first ever film version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein! Clocking in at 12 minutes and 41 seconds, this film was directed by J. Searle Dawley and stars Charles Ogle as the monster.
Admittedly, the surviving prints of this 107 year-old movie are not in the greatest condition. But I still think it’s effectively surreal and, in its way, quite creepy. While it always takes a while for modern audiences to get used to the more theatrical acting styles of the silent films, Charles Ogle still makes for a very memorable monster. I especially enjoy the tinted scenes where the monster comes to life. In the video below, it start around the 2:18 mark and it’s truly a scene that I love!
For today’s horror on the lens, we have a 1975 made-for-television movie called The Dead Don’t Die!
The Dead Don’t Die takes place in Chicago during the 1930s. George Hamilton is a sailor who comes home just in time to witness his brother being executed for a crime that he swears he didn’t commit. Hamilton is convinced that his brother was innocent so he decides to launch an investigation of his own. This eventually leads to Hamilton not only being attacked by dead people but also discovering a plot involving a mysterious voodoo priest!
Featuring atmospheric direction for Curtis Harrington and a witty script by Robert Bloch, The Dead Don’t Die is an enjoyable horror mystery. Along with George Hamilton, the cast includes such luminaries of “old” Hollywood as Ray Milland, Ralph Meeker, Reggie Nalder, and Joan Blondell. (Admittedly, George Hamilton is not the most convincing sailor to ever appear in a movie but even his miscasting seems to work in a strange way.)
For the crime of having murdered over a 100 people, “Meat Cleaver Max” Jenke (Brion James) is sentenced to death and sent to the electric chair. Even though everyone thinks that Max was electrocuted, his electricity-fueled spirit is still alive and pissed off. If this sounds familiar, that is because it is the exact same premise that was used in Destroyer. The only difference is that Max is not haunting a prison and killing a film crew. Instead, he is living in a basement and seeking revenge on Lucas McCarthy (Lance Henriksen), the cop who arrested him.
A year and a half ago, serial killer Ivan Mosser (Lyle Alzado) was sent to the electric chair for murdering 23 people. On the night that he was electrocuted, the worst prison riot in American history broke out. The prison was closed and abandoned. A year and a half later, a film crew has entered the prison to make a women in prison film. Robert Edwards (Anthony Perkins) is the sleazy director. David Harris (Clayton Rohner) is the screenwriter who fights to maintain the integrity of his script and who is an expert on the prison’s history. Susan Malone (Deborah Foreman) is a stuntwoman and David’s girlfriend. And Ivan is the murderer who is still half-alive and full of electricity.
Through the Shattered Lens 