Though I may not agree with the film’s conclusions, Bob Clark’s 1979 film Murder By Decree is still the best of the Jack the Ripper films.
This scene, featuring the final battle between Sherlock Holmes (Christopher Plummer) and the Ripper, is not only full of fog-shrouded atmosphere but it also features one of the most savage portrayals of Jack the Ripper.
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today, we pay tribute to a filmmaker who got his start in Canada. Though born in America, Clark spent most his career up north. Though he’s today best remembered for directing the holiday classic, A Christmas Story, Clark started his career as a horror director. In fact, long before telling the story of Ralphie and his BB gun, Clark directed one of the first Christmas slasher films.
Today, we honor the legacy of Bob Clark with….
4 Shots From 4 Bob Clark Films
Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things (1972, dir by Bob Clark, DP: Jack McGowan)
Deathdream (1974, dir by Bob Clark, DP: Jack McGowan)
Black Christmas (1974, dir by Bob Clark, DP: Reginald H. Morris)
Murder By Decree (1979, dir by Bob Clark, DP: Reginald H. Morris)
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, at 9 pm et, Tim Buntley will be hosting #ScarySocial! The movie? 1992’s Army of Darkness!
If you want to join us this Friday, just hop onto twitter, start the movie at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag! I’ll be there tweeting and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
Army of Darkness is available on Prime!
See you there
I should start things off with a confession. This is actually not the first time that I’ve shared Manos: The Hands of Fate here on the Shattered Lens. I previously shared it during the 2013, 2015, 2020, ad 2022 Horrorthons and, each time, I even used the exact same picture of Torgo.
However, Manos proved to be such a popular choice that I simply had to post it again. Manos has a reputation for being one of the worst films ever made. And, honestly, who am I to disagree? (Though disagree, I do.) However, it’s also a film that simply has to be seen.
(As well, I love regional horror and there are a few films as regional as Manos, a film that was filmed in my home state of Texas and directed by a fertilizer salesman.)
By the way, everyone who watches Manos ends up making fun of Torgo, who was played by John Reynolds. What they may not know is that Reynolds committed suicide shortly after filming on Manos wrapped. So, as tempting at it may be to ridicule poor Mr. Reynolds’s performance, save your barbs for Torgo and leave John Reynolds alone.
And be sure to enjoy Manos: The Hands of Fate!
It’s going to be a bit of a mini-October Positivity review tonight. I spent today helping my neighbors move then crying because my neighbors had moved, and then trying to talk my new neighbors into not getting rid of their new house’s hot tub. I’m tired, so I’m going to try to keep things relatively short tonight.
In 2023’s Before It Happened, Eli Jenkins (played by the film’s director, Andrew Jacob Brown) is such a hard-boiled cop and detective that, when he realizes that the Mayor of his town has been kidnapping children and holding them prisoner in his home, he literally forces his way into the house and puts that perverted public official in his place. Now, you would think that the Mayor of reasonably-sized town being arrested for kidnapping a child would be big news and Detective Jenkins would be on all of the Fox or Newsmax shows. Instead, Jenkins gets yelled at for not following procedure.
Uhhmm, guys — your mayor was abducting children and holding them prisoner in his home! His wife was helping him! Why does no one in this movie seem to think this is as strange as I do? I mean, seriously, I know that we’re no longer shocked when a public official is arrested but this still seems like a pretty big deal.
Anyway, Jenkins is given a new assignment. He needs to find his ex-partner, Bobby (Jason Haines), and bring him to meet with his brother, the chief of police (Brian Eberly) who happens to be dying. Jenkins tracks down Bobby but it turns out that Bobby, who was once a good and ambitious cop, is now totally irresponsible and in debt because he sold some valuable basketball cards to a comic book store. Jenkins has to get the cards back before he can even think of taking Bobby to see his brother. Since the original owner of the cards is holding Jenkins’s current partner (Christopher Shane Lowry) as a hostage, it is literally a matter of life-and-death. Bobby and Jenkins work together to try to make things right and, along the way, they confront their own demons. This leads to an increasingly complicated series of events. Meanwhile, almost everyone that Jenkins talks to tells him that the Biblical prophecies are coming true and that the world will soon end….
There were some good things about this film. I did smile a bit at just how complicated Eli’s relatively simple assignment became. He just couldn’t catch a break and no one was willing to help out until Eli did something for them first. That part of the film had a lot of potential. But, like so many faith-based film, Before It Happened suffers from amateurish acting and a script that often seems to be trying too hard to imitate the big budget blockbusters that inspired the film. Sometimes, you just have to be willing to admit that you don’t have the budget or the experience necessary to make a Hollywood-style crime drama. Before It Happened‘s story had potential but the execution failed to realize it.
First released in 1970, Herschell Gordon’s Lewis’s The Wizard of Gore tells the story of Montag The Magnificent (Ray Sager), a magician who has a rather macabre stage show.
After lecturing his audience about how everyone secretly wants to see blood and violence, he selects a female volunteer from the audience. Both the woman and the rest of the audience are hypnotized. Montag’s tricks all involve mutilating his volunteers. One volunteer is chainsawed. Another gets a metal spike driven into her brain. Another is drilled by a giant punch press. (Like seriously, how does one store a giant punch press?) The hypnotized audience only sees Montag using his various instruments of torture but they don’t see the wounds or the blood or the intestines. (The movie audience is a bit less lucky.) The victim is hypnotized into not realizing that she has essentially been murdered but, when the hypnosis wears off after the show, they promptly drop dead, mysteriously mutilated in the same way that everyone saw Montag miming on stage.
Naturally, the police arrest Montag and the movie ends.
No, actually, it doesn’t. Even though it’s obvious that Montag is the murderer and that he’s hypnotizing people, the police don’t arrest him because his hypnotized audience swears that Montag didn’t really hurt anyone during his stage act. However, television host Sherry (Judy Cler) and her lunkhead boyfriend, Jack (Wayne Ratay), both come to believe that Montag is the killer and they try set up a plot to expose him on national television, Montag can’t hypnotize people through the television …. can he!? And if he can do that, who is to say that he hasn’t hypnotized the people in the theater who would have been watching The Wizard of Gore when it was first released?
The Wizard of Gore appears to have been Herschell Gordon Lewis’s attempt to comment on his own status as a director who was notorious for making gory films. (His 1963 film, Blood Feast, is often referred to as being the first gore film.) Montag is a monster who appeals to his audience’s desire to see something extreme and forbidden. For all of Montag’s evil, he can only exist and get more victims because people are willing to watch him torture strangers. Lewis was not exactly known for being a particularly artful director but the shots of Montag’s victims screaming in terror while Montag’s audience silently and unemotionally watches are about as close to a genuinely powerful moment as you’re likely to find in a Herschell Gordon Lewis film. The Wizard of Gore, with its commentary on the gore genre that Lewis himself largely invented, is one of Lewis’s more self-referential films. And with it’s trick ending and shots of people suddenly collapsing with their intestines literally spilling out of them, it’s also one of Lewis’s stranger films and that’s saying something when you consider just how many odd films Lewis made over the course of the 60s and 70s. (There’s a reason why one of his better films was called Something Weird.) The Wizard of Gore is definitely a Lewis film, with his trademark stiff actors and non sequitur dialogue giving the whole thing a dream-like feel.
There’s a scene in Juno where Jason Bateman tells the film’s title character that Herschell Gordon Lewis is a superior filmmaker to Dario Argento and that The Wizard of Gore is scarier than Suspiria. As soon as I heard that, I knew his character was going to turn out to be a sleaze and I was right. The Wizard of Gore is a historically interesting film, especially for those who love the old grindhouse films. But it’s no Suspiria.
Samantha stands trial, accused of killing her father, mother, and two of her sisters. She is acquitted. Five years later, she’s trapped on the family yacht, stranded at sea with the ship’s onboard computer ordering her to remove her limbs and slash her face. Every morning, she wakes up and it’s as if nothing happened. But during the evening, she goes through the entire ritual again. Samantha feels that she is being punished for murdering her family, except that Samantha did not murder her family. While being tortured on the boat, she thinks back and tries to figure out who the guilty party actually was.
It’s an interesting idea but a dumb movie. You’re stuck on a boat, far from civilization and medical help. The only other person on the boat is your husband, who can’t help you because the boat’s onboard computer has locked him out of control room. Are you going to chop off your finger just because a computer tells you to? Are you going to saw off your hand, just because the computer says so? The boat is also haunted by ghosts and I wish the movie had just focused on them instead of bringing in the computer and the time loop element.
The movie just doesn’t work. The plot is overstuffed and the acting is terrible. Try not to laugh when you hear the dialogue between the judges and the lawyers in the courtroom scene. The yacht is a good location but a few long shots make it obvious that the yacht is not as far away from civilization as Samantha and her husband seem to think.
All in all, a misfire.
Today’s horror scene that I love comes from 1970’s The Wizard of Gore. Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis, this uniquely acted scene should be familiar to anyone who has ever watched the montage that opens most of the Something Weird video releases.
In the 1956 film, The She-Creature, bodies are being discovered on the beach. The murderer appears to be a bizarre, humanoid creature with gills and scaly skin. It commits its dastardly crimes and then it disappears back into the ocean! What could it be? Is it a genuine monster? Is it a psycho diver in a rubber suit? Is it just some random murderer that hides in the shadows and stalks the night like a cat searching for mouse?
While bodies are showing up on the beach, Dr. Carlo Lombardi (Chester Morris), is trying to convince the world that his theories about reincarnation and the occult are correct. Usually clad in a tuxedo and accompanied by his assistant, Andrea (Marla English), Dr. Lombardi swears that everyone has lived a past life and that, when under hypnosis, people are capable of reliving all of their past lives. Dr. Lombardi theorizes that reincarnation has been going on since the beginning of time and, as a result, a hypnotized person could even relive their past life as a cave dweller or, presumably, a single-celled creature floating around in a lake. Actually, under Lomradi’s theory, I guess it’s possible that someone could have been a dinosaur in a past life.
(It’s probably best not to give that too much thought because most people would probably be disappointed to discover that they weren’t one of the cool dinosaurs but instead, they were one of those goofy green lizards that was always running out of the way of the cool dinosaurs. No matter how many times someone bangs a gong, not everyone can be a T-rex, sorry. Everyone wants to be the dinosaur that eats but no one wants to be the one that got eaten.)
The scientific community scoffs at Dr. Lombardi but when he puts Andrea under hypnosis, it’s enough for Timothy Chappell (Tom Conway) to want to go into business with him. The scientific community may scoff at Lombardi and his theories but Chappell sees him as the key to a fortune. Who cares if his powers are real or not? Well, Lombardi cares and he’s discovered that he can use hypnosis to cause Andrea to turn into a prehistoric monster who will kill his enemies!
(Actually, Dr. Lombardi is such a good hpynotist that he’s even able to convince a dog to kill his owner. Then again, maybe he just offered the dog a treat for being a good boy. Who knows how the canine mind works?)
An entertaining B-movie, The She-Creature benefits from the committed performance of veteran tough guy Chester Morris, the other-worldly beauty of Marla English (who was cast because it was correctly felt she resembled Elizabeth Taylor), and the noir-influence direction of Edward L. Cahn. The plot makes no sense but it hold your interest and the monster is a genuinely impressive creation.
On a personal note, I’ve never bought into reincarnation but if I was anyone in a past life, I was probably either Edie Sedgwick or Alice Roosevelt.
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films is all about letting the visuals do the talking.
Today’s director is the Godfather of Gore himself, Herschell Gordon Lewis!
4 Shots From 4 Herschell Gordon Lewis Films
Blood Feast (1963, dir by Herschell Gordon Lewis, DP: Herschell Gordon Lewis)
Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964, dir by Herschell Gordon Lewis, DP: Herschell Gordon Lewis)
Something Weird (1967, dir by Herschell Gordon Lewis, DP: Andy Romanoff)
The Wizard of Gore (1970, dir by Herschell Gordon Lewis, DP: Alex Ameri and Daniel Krogh)
Through the Shattered Lens 