Today, we have In Search of Bigfoot, a 1976 documentary about the search for everyone’s favorite backwoods inhabitant. Will our hunters be able to find Bigfoot before the camera runs out of film? Will we hear stories about playing catch with Sasquatch? Watch to find out!
(Personally, I always love these pseudo-scientific documentaries. After the success of The Legend of Boggy Creek, they were apparently all the rage for a little while. Can you prove it didn’t happen?)
Since we are now almost halfway through October, it only seems appropriate to share what may be the most famous (and perhaps the most covered) song about witchcraft, Donavon’s Season of the Witch!
This song was originally recorded in 1966 and it’s gone on to become a Halloween mainstay. One fan of the song was future director Martin Scorsese, who originally planned to borrow the song’s title for one of his own films. However, George Romero beat Scorsese out the gate with a film called Season of the Witch and Scorsese ended up renaming his film, Mean Streets.
As I’ve stated many times on this site, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is one of my favorite horror films and it’s also one of the few horror films that can still scare me even after I’ve seen it hundreds of time. Those two little “Come and play with us” girls still freak me out and I still think about the blood pouring out of that elevator at least one week out of the month.
That said, one of my favorite scenes from The Shining comes early on in the film. It’s the scene where Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson, of course) is driving his family to the Overlook Hotel for the first time. He’s already visited for his job interview but this is the first time that his family is going to see their new home. And, as you can tell in this scene, he already appears to be kind of sick of them.
Seriously, when someone is driving and has that expression on his face, don’t ask him about the Donner Party.
What I love about this scene is Nicholson’s obvious exasperation. You can just tell that he’s thinking, “I’m going to be stuck in a hotel with these two for months.” I especially love the way that he delivers the line about Danny learning about cannibalism from the television. (Of course, I think one reason why Jack is upset is because Wendy’s the one who brought up the Donner Party, in the first place. If you don’t want your child to know about cannibalism, don’t randomly start talking about a famous example of it. That’s parenting 101, I’d think.)
Seriously, if I was a passenger in that car, that is exactly when I would say, “Pull over and let me out. This is not going to end well.”
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!
4 Shots From 4 Horror Films
The Shining (1980, dirby Stanley Kubrick, DP: John Alcott)
Swamp Thing (dir by Wes Craven, DP: Robbie Greenberg)
Scalps (1983, dir by Fred Olen Ray, DP: Larry Van Loon and Cynthia Webster)
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984, dir by Joseph Zito, DP: João Fernandes)
by Harold Delay
This cover is from 1939.
This song appears on the Pet Sematary 2 soundtrack, which might be the best soundtrack to have never been given an official release. In the film, this is the song that plays over the end credits. The video follows the film’s story of the dead rising back to life.
Enjoy!
For our final episode of Fear Itself, we have Echoes. In this episode, a man discover that he was a killer in a previous life. Director Rupert Wainwright also directed the remake of The Fog. Does anyone remember that remake?
Though this episode was meant to air in 2008, the show went on hiatus and was then cancelled before it could air. It was finally released in 2009, as a part of the Fear Itself box set.
There’s a scene in Howard the Duck where Tim Robbins looks like he briefly wants to strangle the title character, and I don’t blame him. Howard the Duck (voiced by Chip Zien) is not a very likable character in this movie. Due to an experiment with a laser spectroscope, he’s been transported from his planet to Earth. He’s in a world he didn’t make, and he doesn’t stop complaining for one moment. As for Tim Robbins, he plays Phil Blumburtt, a laboratory assistant who is a friend of Beverly Switzler (Lea Thompson), the aspiring singer who is also Howard’s girlfriend. Beverly ends up getting abducted by Dr. Jennings (Jeffrey Jones), Phil’s boss, who has been possessed by a space monster that was brought to Earth by the same spectroscope that caught Howard. Howard wants to return to his planet, but he also wants to manage Beverly’s band; first, though, he has to defeat the space monsters.
Produced by George Lucas and based on the character created by Steve Gerber, Howard the Duck was a notorious box office bomb when it was first released in 1986, and it’s actually one of the reasons why it took so long for Marvel to start regularly producing films. I watched it recently to see if it had gotten any better with age, but no, it’s still pretty bad. Lea Thompson is cute, likable, and probably a little bit too sexy for a film about a talking duck, but otherwise, it’s a typical ’80s mix of action, comedy, and science fiction that gets too buried under its special effects to really be effective.
The main problem with the movie is its version of Howard himself. According to Steve Gerber, Howard the Duck was originally envisioned as being an animated film, but Lucas decided to do the film live-action, which meant creating a duck suit for Ed Gale to walk around in. Unfortunately, the suit doesn’t look like a duck, animated or real. It made Howard look like a puppet. The scenes of an underwear-clad Beverly rolling around with a duck were already strange enough without making the duck look like a ventriloquist dummy. The movie also didn’t capture the personality that made Howard so memorable in the comic books. In the comic books, Howard is cynical, easily irritated, and frustrated with the madness of everyday life. He’s an intellectual duck who wants to be left alone. In the movie, he tells a lot of bad jokes and is only once seen smoking his famous cigar. The satire that was at the heart of Gerber’s creation is lost as Howard instead tries to save Earth from being conquered by another group of aliens.
The movie never really decides if it wants to be a comedy or a big-budget action film. The movie not only damaged George Lucas’s reputation as a producer, but it also ended Willard Huyck’s career as a director. Howard the Duck is still a beloved character amongst readers. I remember the entire theater applauding when he showed up in Guardians of the Galaxy, looking like a real talking duck and voiced by Seth Green. He was featured in several episodes of What If…?. There might be a movie future for this duck yet.
In the far future, the Leprechaun (Warwick Davis) is living on another planet where he’s trying to marry a space princess and he’s interfering with Earth’s mining operations. A bunch of Space Marines show up and take the Leprechaun out. One of the Marines decides to take a leak on the Leprechaun’s remains. The reborn Leprechaun later springs out of the Marine’s penis, which I guess is one of those leprechaun powers that usually goes unmentioned. The Space Marines are in trouble and so is the franchise. A sudden trip into space is usually a pretty good sign that you’ve run out of ideas.
I was hoping that this one, like the second and the third Leprechaun films, would turn out to be better than I remembered but no, it was still pretty crappy. Obviously, continuity has never been too big a deal in these movies but what is an Irish leprechaun doing on a different planet and why does it now take a group of Space Marines to stop him whereas once all it took was Jennifer Aniston? Sending the Leprechaun into space sounds like it should work but the action is slow and the script is lacking in even providing a few good one liners. I don’t think much thought was given to the film, beyond tossing the little guy into orbit.
As always, Warwick Davis is the strength of the franchise. He’s the main reason why I always want these movies to be better than they actually are. Otherwise, Leprechaun 4 doesn’t even work on a camp level. The movie ends with a giant leprechaun hand giving everyone the finger. Was that meant to be for the Space Marines or the audience?
BLACKTOP opens on stand-up comic David (Lochlyn Munro) in the middle of his act at an out of the way truckers bar. His girlfriend Sylvia (Kristin Davis) is at the show, and she doesn’t look very happy. After the show, we find out that David & Sylvia’s relationship is not in a good place at all. She wants to settle down and get married, and he wants to keep performing his shows even though his career is going nowhere. When he tells her he’s agreed to perform three more nights the next weekend at that same place, she blows a gasket and wants to get out of there. Conveniently, a nice trucker named Jack (Meat Loaf), who she had only just met a little earlier, is there handy, and she asks him for a ride out of town in his truck, Goliath. He happily agrees, almost too happily, because it turns out he just might be a serial killer. Sensing something’s off and wanting to get his girlfriend back, David takes off after them, hoping to find them before she becomes the next victim.
That’s the basis for this “mad trucker” thriller that premiered on HBO back in October of 2000. If the story sounds ludicrous to you, just know that it is. It takes a completely stupid decision to kick off the events of the story. Seriously Sylvia, David may be a bit of a loser, but do you have to abandon him and ride off into the night with a trucker you don’t know, who looks like Meat Loaf, just to make a point?!! Don’t you think you may be overreacting?!! Some might say that I’m making too big of a deal about this, that it’s just a plot device to set the story of “terror in a big rig” in motion. You are correct in some ways, but her moronic decision stuck with me through the rest of the movie. Later, when she was supposed to be tough, smart and resourceful, I kept thinking about her dumb decision that put her in this predicament, and how many people had already been killed or seriously maimed because of it.
The story also includes these silly little details like Jack leaving clues for David along the way so that he can have a chance to find them. Somehow Jack can perfectly predict David’s exact route and speed so he can place all these notes at the perfect places on the road, with some of them pretty complicated. And he does this without Sylvia even noticing. Sylvia isn’t exactly the most observant person around. Nothing proves this any more than a scene where Jack has Sylvia sit close to him so he can show her how to drive the big rig. While he’s giving her tips, David is trying to drive up and save her. The mad trucker does all this swerving and slamming on breaks and sliding and plays it all off like he’s just showing her some easy and safe driving moves. Sylvia never realizes David is anywhere near them, and since Jack hasn’t gone full psycho yet, she doesn’t seem to care. Maybe I’m just not that big of a fan of Kristin Davis, either. I never really liked her on SEX AND THE CITY, and I don’t like her that much in this either, even though I did kind of like the scenes where she took off her shirt and wandered around in her bra.
Not to sound like this is pick on Kristin Davis day, because I didn’t care for Lochlyn Munro as David either. He was supposed to be this stand-up comic, but he wasn’t funny at all. I mean some people were laughing because the script said so, but he’s lucky tomatoes weren’t being thrown at him. I found everything bland and boring about him, even though he drove a Red 1959 Edsel. That was actually kind of funny, as he kept taking on the big rig with it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an Edsel / Peterbilt duel in a movie before, but it happens here several times.
By far the best part of BLACKTOP for me was watching Meat Loaf as Trucker Jack. Loaf had played a villainous trucker in BLACK DOG with Patrick Swayze a couple of years earlier, so the filmmakers must have reasoned that the public wanted more. I’ll admit that his character in this does seem awfully nice at first, and the people around seem to think he’s a pretty good guy too. But he also has this look in his eyes, and when he stops turning on the charm, he’s ready to kill. He’s a kind and empathetic ear to Kristin’s character one moment, and then he’s cutting off someone’s ear with his big knife the next. He’s fixing a nice meal for Kristin one moment, and then he’s shooting at David right in front of her with his high-powered rifle the next. Once she sees that side of him, she starts trying to fight back, and that’s when he gets to go over the top. When he gets to be crazy Trucker Jack, the kind of guy who hangs sides of beef along with murdered victims in the freezer in his truck; those were my favorite parts of the movie.
I know my review sounds very critical in places, and I don’t want to come off too hard on the film. If you’re looking for some solid big rig stunt driving work, and a very simple story featuring a psychopathic truck driver, you could have some fun with this one. Meat Loaf has some fun in his role, so if you’re a fan you should enjoy his work. Just keep your expectations low and don’t ever think that any of the characters are about to make some smart decisions. That seems to be the recipe for enjoying this trip down the BLACKTOP!
