4 Or More Shots From 4 Or More 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!
This October, I’m going to be doing something a little bit different with my contribution to 4 (or more) Shots From 4 (or more) Films. I’m going to be taking a little chronological tour of the history of horror cinema, moving from decade to decade.
Today, we take a look at 2013 and 2014!
6 Shots From 6 Films: 2013 — 2014
Only Lovers Left Alive (2013, dir by Jim Jarmusch, DP: Yorick Le Saux)
Under the Skin (2013, dir by Jonathan Glazer, DP: Daniel Landin)
The Conjuring (2013, dir by James Wan, DP: John R. Leonetti)
The Babadook (2014, dir by Jennifer Kent, DP: Radek Ładczuk)
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014, dir by Ana Lily Amirpour, DP: Lyle Vincent)
The Purge: Anarchy (2014, dir by James DeMonaco, DP: Jacques Jouffret)
First released way back in 1979, Prophecy is one of those films where a big evil corporation is selfishly polluting the environment and a group of noble Native Americans is convinced that a vengeful spirit of the forest has been awakened as a result.
We’re told that the vengeful spirit is named Katahdin and that it’s “as large as a dragon and has the eyes of a cat.” We’re also told, by someone who claims to have actually seen it, that the Katahdin is a combination of several different creatures, “a part of everything that is God’s creation.”
Sound pretty scary, right?
Well, it is until the bear itself actually shows up on screen. That’s when we find ourselves confronted with this:
I mean, don’t get me wrong. He certainly is ugly. But he just looks so silly and …. well, fake.
The lesson here, and it’s an important one, is that you should never put your monster onscreen unless it can actually live up to all the hype. Take a lesson from Spielberg. When it became obvious that the shark in Jaws looked like a tin model, Spielberg made the decision to not show the shark. Instead, he gave us a lot of point of view shots and, by the time the shark did appear, audiences were so frightened that it didn’t matter whether it looked convincing or not. Prophecy makes the mistake of having its monster all over the place and it just doesn’t work.
Of course, once the EPA’s Dr. Robert Verne (Robert Foxworth) shows up with his pregnant wife (Talia Shire, who somehow went from The Godfather and Rocky to this), he discovers that one reason why the Katahdinh doesn’t live up to all the hype is because it’s just a mutant bear. It turns out that all that pollution led to some crazy results and now every logger, Native American activist, and camper in the area is in danger! Can Dr. Verne and a team of disposable, forgettable characters end the threat of Katahdinh!?
Prophecy is a big, dumb movie that’s never as much fun as you want it to be. There is one early scene that features a camper trying to hop away from Katahdinah while zipped up in a sleeping bag. That scene — which ends with one ruined sleeping back and lot of feathers floating around — is just demented enough to be kind of fun:
Otherwise, the entire film is slow-moving and rather dull. Part of the problem is that it was directed by John Frankenheimer, a major and important filmmaker who had entirely the wrong sensibility for this film. Frankenheimer was a legitimately great director (among his good credits: The Manchurian Candidate, Birdman of Alcatraz, Ronin, Seconds) but he takes the material too seriously. He spends so much time trying to sell the film’s environmental message that he forgets that the majority of the audience for a film like this isn’t watching because they want to become a better person. They’re watching for mutant bear mayhem! This is the type of film that needed to be directed by someone from the Roger Corman school of quick thrills and shameless shlock.
So, here are the twin lessons of Prophecy: know your audience and make sure your monster can live up to its reputation! Otherwise, you’ll just be known for that one scene with the exploding sleeping bag.
(I originally shared this film back in 2011 and 2019 — can you believe we’ve been doing this for that long? — but the YouTube vid was taken down both times! So, I’m resharing it today!)
For today’s excursion into the world of public domain horror, I offer up the film debut of Francis Ford Coppola. Before Coppola directed the Godfather and Apocalypse Now, he directed a low-budget, black-and-white thriller that was called Dementia 13. (Though, in a sign of things to come, producer Roger Corman and Coppola ended up disagreeing on the film’s final cut and Corman reportedly brought in director Jack Hill to film and, in some cases, re-film additional scenes.)
Regardless of whether the credit should go to Coppola, Corman, or Hill, Dementia 13 is a brutally effective little film that is full of moody photography and which clearly served as an influence on the slasher films that would follow it in the future. Speaking of influence,Dementia 13 itself is obviously influenced by the Italian giallo films that, in 1963, were just now starting to make their way into the drive-ins and grindhouses of America.
In the cast, keep an eye out for Patrick Magee, who later appeared as Mr. Alexander in A Clockwork Orange as well as giving a memorable performance in Lucio Fulci’s The Black Cat. Luana Anders, who plays the duplicitous wife in this film, showed up in just about every other exploitation film made in the 60s and yes, the scene where she’s swimming freaks me out to no end.
This song is off of Iron Maiden’s 17th studio album, 2021’s Senjutsu. Directed by Swedish animator Gustaf Holtenäs, the epic music video for Stratego imagines an battle in ancient Japan. Thematically and visually, it goes along with the cover of the album, which featured Eddie dressed as a samurai and holding a katana.
The old west could be a dangerous and haunted place, as was revealed in this episode of HBO’s Tales From The Crypt! Outlaw Billy Quintaine (Neil Guintoli) enters a saloon and discovers that the spirits of his victims have been waiting for him!
This episode originally aired on August 1st, 1992. Along with being directed by The Omen‘s Richard Donner, it was written by Frank Darabont.
In the 1940s, Veronica Lake was undoubtedly a star. She appeared in Preston Sturges’s classic comedy, Sullivan’s Travels. She played the femme fatale in a series of classic film noirs. She proved herself to be just as capable of playing comedy as she was playing drama. By wearing her hair down and often allowing it to fall over her right eye, she created the peek-a-boo hairstyle. She was briefly a star and a fashion icon but she also developed a reputation for heavy drinking and being difficult to work with. During World War II, the U.S. government actually requested that Lake change her hairstyle in order to decrease incidents of women, many of whom were working factories as a part of the war effort, getting their hair tangled in the machinery. Lake did so, cutting her long hair and going for a more practical look. Her career never recovered.
The years following her 1940s heyday would not easy ones for Veronica Lake. Along with multiple divorces, she also struggled with alcoholism and with the IRS. Lake spent much of the 50s in England. When she returned to the States in the 60s, she was arrested several times for public drunkenness and eventually took a job as a waitress to pay the bills. A news story about her life as a waitress renewed some interest in Veronica Lake, as did the publication of her memoirs in 1969. As so often happened with former stars who fell on hard times, she considered taking roles in the type of low budget films that she wouldn’t have even been offered when she was at the height of her fame.
That brings us to Flesh Feast.
In Flesh Feast, Veronica Lake is cast as Dr. Elaine Frederick. Living in a dilapidated mansion in Florida, Dr. Frederick believes that she has discovered the perfect way to not only look younger but to also reverse the aging process itself! It involves maggots, lots and lots of maggots. For just a few dollars, Dr. Frederick will apply maggots to your skin and, like magic, they’ll suck away the years. That may sound disgusting but, whenever the viewer is show Dr. Frederick working in her laboratory, it’s obvious that the maggots are instead grains of rice.
Dr. Frederick is approached by a group of South American neo-Nazis who want Dr. Frederick to use her maggots to make their leader young again. They refuse to tell her the name of their leader but you can guess who it is, right? I mean, he’s living in Argentina. He’s in hiding. The rest of the world thinks that he’s dead. He’s German. He used to be involved in the government …. oh, okay, I’ll tell you. It’s Hitler. The group wants Dr. Frederick to use her maggots to make Hitler young again. Dr. Frederick agrees but it turns out that she’s only interested in getting revenge!
There’s a lot of negative things you can say about Flesh Feast but it’s perhaps the only film to feature Veronica Lake laughing as a bunch of maggots eat Hitler’s face. Don’t get me wrong. It takes forever to actually reach that moment. There’s a whole subplot about a journalist trying to investigate Dr. Franklin’s experiments. As well, Dr. Franklin’s assistant is an undercover government agent and she keeps stumbling across dead bodies at inopportune times. The first 70 minutes of Flesh Feast are about as draggy and boring as any movie that I’ve ever seen. But, after all that, you get to see Veronica Lake kill Hitler. Some would say that’s definitely worth the price of admission!
Flesh Feast was Veronica Lake’s final movie. (She not only starred in the film but she co-produced it as well. Director Brad Grinter was also responsible for Blood Freak.) It was filmed in 1967 but not released until 1970, after the publication of her memoirs renewed interest in her career. Unfortunately, Flesh Feast didn’t exactly do well at the box office. Lake would die just three years later, at the age of only 50. But her films and her performances will live forever.
Back in frontier times, a warlock named Walter Machden (John Carradine) terrorized the citizens of the town of Oakmoor Crossing so they tracked him down and lynched him. Before he was hung, Machden cursed the town. A demon with a jack-o-lantern for a head terrorized the town until the Kelly Family defeated him and buried him underneath a cross.
Jump forward one hundred years. It is Halloween night and some drunk teenagers knock over the cross. Jack-O comes back to life and kills the teenagers. Jack-O sets out to get revenge on the Kelly family but, for some reason, he decides to kill their neighbors, some more teenagers, and a TV cable guy before going after his targets. It’s up to young Sean Kelly (Ryan Latshaw) to figure out how to defeat Jack-O for a second time.
The most interesting thing about Jack-O is that it features John Carradine, even though he died a full seven years before the movie was released. That either means that Jack-O had an unusually long post-production period or the Carradine scenes were shot for another movie and were clumsily inserted into Jack-O. Carradine was not the only deceased star to make an appearance in Jack-O. Cameron Mitchell, who passed away in 1994, also makes an appearance as a horror movie host. Because you can’t have a movie with Carradine and Cameron Mitchell without including Linnea Quigley, she appears as a babysitter who takes a lengthy shower. Fortunately, Linnea Quigley is still with us.
Overall, Jack-O is regrettable. The demon, with his Jack-O-Lantern head, is more likely to inspire laughs than screams and it never makes sense that Jack-O would take so much time to kill everyone except for the people that he is actually looking to kill. The best death involves a toaster but Jack-O doesn’t do anything with the toaster. Instead, someone just slips and sticks a utensil in the toaster, leading to a shocking death. Combine the poor acting with the poor special effects with notably ragged editing that often makes it unclear how much time has passed between scenes and you have a Halloween film that is no holiday.
You were just a traveler, passing through Power, Montana, when your car broke down. Temporarily stranded, you were thankful when a local farmer offered to let you stay in his guest room for the night. But then something terrible descends upon Power and you find yourself running through the town, fearful for your life.
The objective of Power, MT is straight-forward. Make your way through town and hopefully, find some sort of protection before you are captured by the strange, apparently supernatural storm that is pursuing you. To be able to do this, though, you’re going to need the flashlight on your phone to see where you are going. And, with each turn, that flashlight drains your battery and leaves you that much close to being plunged into a darkness from which there is no escape. It’s a simple and relatable premise. Who hasn’t hit the panic button while searching for a place to recharge their phone? The game is well-written and there are a lot of places to explore, even if there’s not always a lot of time to reach them. Power, MT captures the feeling of running for your life. It’s a challenging game (so be prepared to die a few times while figure it out) but it’s also not impossible to win.
Through the Shattered Lens 