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.
What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!
If you were having trouble sleeping last Tuesday, around one in the morning, you could have turned over to TCM and watched Remember My Name, an odd and sometimes frustrating little thriller from 1978.
Remember My Name opens with Emily (Geraldine Chaplin) showing up in a small town in California. From the minute we first see and hear Emily, something seems to be off about her. She views the world through suspicious eyes. Whenever anyone talks to her, you’re never quite sure whether she’s going be friendly or if she’s going to lash out. When she speaks, there’s something weird about her vocal inflection, as if she’s always struggling to figure out what she’s supposed to say. She seems to be separated from the world, almost as if she’s walking through a living dream and only talking to figments of her imagination. There’s nothing about her that feels at all authentic.
She moves into a small apartment and enters into a relationship with her handyman (Moses Gunn), a relationship that seems to be largely defined by her refusal to open up about herself. She gets a job at a grocery story that’s managed by a Mr. Nudd (Jeff Goldblum). Mr. Nudd mentions something about Emily knowing his mother. Apparently, they met in prison.
Soon, Emily is stalking a construction worker named Neil Curry (Anthony Perkins). When Neil spots her, he calls out her name and Emily runs away. And yet, Neil doesn’t bother to tell his wife, Barbara (Berry Berenson), about Emily. Soon, Emily is even breaking into the Curry home, silently shadowing Barbara as she walks through the house.
I described Remember My Name as being a thriller and I guess that, technically it is. There are a few moments of tension, especially when Emily is stalking Barbara. However, the film itself is directed in a detached manner by Alan Rudolph. Rudolph was a protegé of director Robert Altman (who also produced Remember My Name) and Rudolph’s approach is very Altmanesque, often to the detriment of the film. (Chaplin and Jeff Goldblum had both appeared in several Altman films, most famously in Nashville.) Though the film is dominated by Chaplin and Perkins, it’s still very much an ensemble film and the action plays out in a deceptively casual, almost random manner. It tries so hard to be Altmanesque that Remember My Name gets a bit frustrating, to be honest. Chaplin gives such a good and memorable performance and she works very hard to make Emily a character who is both frightening and, at times, surprisingly sympathetic but, for the most part, Rudolph’s technique makes it difficult to get emotionally involved in any of the action unfolding on-screen. Rudolph observes the action but refuses to comment on it. As a result, Remember My Name is occasionally intriguing but, just as often, it’s rather boring. Just like real life, I suppose. And, just like real life, it’s not for everyone.
That said, it was interesting to see Anthony Perkins playing a role other than a knife-wielding inn manager. Without resorting to any of the familiar tics or the neurotic speech patterns that typecast him forever as Norman Bates, Perkins plays Neil as just being a regular, blue collar guy and he actually does a pretty good job. Watching the film, I got the feeling that this was perhaps Perkins’s attempt to change his image. (Whenever Neil appears shirtless, both the film and Perkins seem to be saying, Check out this physique! Would someone only capable of playing a psycho have abs like this?) Neil’s wife, Barbara, was played Perkins’s wife, Berry Berenson. Neither one of them is with us any longer. Perkins died of AIDS in 1990 while Berry Berenson was on one of the planes that flew into the World Trade Center on 9-11. They both did good work in this film, as did Chaplin and Goldblum and, really, the entire cast. It’s just a pity that the film itself isn’t as good as the performances.
Sweet and repressed Amy (Madchen Amick) is a college student who has too much on her plate. She has to take care of her greedy grandmother (Natalie Schaefer, of Gilligan’s Island fame). She has to read a book for her study partner (Corey Parker). She has to sew a dress for her older sister, Gloria (Daisy Hall). She has to find props for the school play. It is her search for props that leads to her buying an old chest at an estate sale. Inside the chest is a red cloak. Amy turns the red cloak into a dress but what she does not know is that the red cloak was previously won by Aztec priests while they conducted human sacrifices. As Professor Buchanan (Anthony Perkins) later explains, anyone who wears the dress will be driven to do evil.
Like Hitler’s Daughter and Deadly Game, I’m Dangerous Tonight was a USA original film. Like those two films, and despite the combined talents of the star of Psycho and the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I’m Dangerous Tonight is not very good. Perkins is mostly just used for exposition while Hooper’s direction suggests that his main concern was picking up his paycheck. I’m Dangerous Tonight will be best appreciated by fans of Madchen Amick. Amick is not only beautiful here but she also plays a character far different from Twin Peaks’s Shelly Johnson.
Also, be sure to keep an eye out for R. Lee Ermey, playing a tough, cigar-chomping police detective as only he can.
A group of terrorists, led by Lou Kramer (Anthony Perkins, at his bitchiest) and Harold Schulman (Michael Parks), have hijacked Esther, a supply ship that services two North Sea oil rigs, Ruth and Jennifer. Kramer demands that the British government pay him 25 millions pounds. If he’s not paid, he’ll blow up the two oil rigs, destroying the British economy and causing a catastrophic environmental disaster. Kramer has also rigged the Esther with explosives. If anyone tries to board the boat, he will blow both the ship and himself up, taking the crew with him.
The British Prime Minister (Faith Brook, playing Margaret Thatcher) could pay the ransom or she could call in counter terrorism expert, Rufus Excalibur ffolkes (Roger Moore).
(Though the name undoubtedly looked odd to American audiences, ffolkes is a common Welsh surname and is often spelled with both fs lowercase.)
Made in between The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker, ffolkes was Roger Moore’s attempt to defy the typecasting that had defined his career. Other than his loyalty to Queen and country, ffolkes has very little in common with James Bond. James Bond was a suave smoker who bedded several women per film, lived in a hip London flat, drank Martinis, and was always ready with a quip. ffolkes is humorless, drinks Scotch, hates cigarette smoke, and lives in an isolated castle. The biggest difference between Bond and ffolkes? Embittered by one bad marriage, ffolkes has no interest in women and refuses to work with them. Instead, ffolkes loves cats.
ffolkes had always been overshadowed by Moore’s work as James Bond but it holds up well as a good, old-fashioned adventure film. In many ways, Anthony Perkins’s Kramer feels like a predecessor to Die Hard‘s Hans Gruber and, if ffolkes had been released ten years later, it probably would have been referred to as being “Die Hard at sea.” If you can get used to him playing someone other than James Bond, Roger Moore does a good job as the eccentric ffolkes and James Mason provides welcome support as ffolkes’s only friend.
Though ffolkes was a box office disappointment, it retains a cult following and it used to show up regularly on British television. (I saw it at least once every summer that I went to the UK.) When it was originally released in the U.K., it was called North Sea Hijack. When it was released in the U.S., presumably under the assumption that American audiences wouldn’t be able to find the North Sea on a map, the title was changed to ffolkes, which probably left audiences more confused than the North Sea ever would have. When the movie was first broadcast on American television, the title was changed yet again, this time to Assault Force.
To quote Roger Moore: “The film has so many title changes that I’ve lost count. But everyone seems to like the character I played.”
For tomorrow’s movie a day, it’s another film where Roger Moore did not play James Bond, The Cannonball Run.
Professor David Sokarev (Rod Steiger) is a nuclear physicist who is scheduled to give a lecture in London. When he is informed by Mossad that a Palestinian splinter group is planning on assassinating him, Sokarev wants to cancel his trip. However, the Israeli government insists that he go to London and put his life in danger. To do otherwise would only serve to embolden the terrorists. Accompanied by two Mossad bodyguards, Sokarev reluctantly leaves for London.
Three Palestinians are intercepted as they attempt to sneak into England. Two of them are killed but the youngest, Famy (Gary Brown), survives and makes his way to London. He meets up with McCoy (Aaron Harris), a world-weary member of the Irish Republican Army. Though McCoy would rather just spend his time with his innocent girlfriend, Norah (Sallyanne Law), he has agreed to help the Palestinians but is shocked to discover that Famy is so inexperienced that he doesn’t even know how to drive.
The head of MI5, Mr. Jones (Alfred Burke), is tasked with keeping Prof. Sokarev safe. He recruits Jimmy (Anthony Perkins), a retired agent. Jimmy once saved Jones’s life but now he is an alcoholic and is considered to be unpredictable and insubordinate. Once Jimmy comes out of retirement, Jones worries that Jimmy is so obsessed with violence that he’s willing to use Sokarev as bait to draw out the terrorists.
The Glory Boys was originally a three-part miniseries that was made for Yorkshire Television. It was later re-edited into a 104 minute movie that was released in the United States. Even late into the 1990s, it was not unusual to come across the edited version of The Glory Boys on late night television. Based on a novel by Gerald Seymour, The Glory Boys holds up well and the issues that it raises, about how far the government should go to battle terrorism, remain relevant today. Rod Steiger brings a lot of dignity to the role of Sokarev and Joanna Lumley has a small role as Jimmy’s girlfriend. But ultimately, the main reason to see The Glory Boys is because of the strange casting of Psycho‘s Anthony Perkins as a British intelligence agent. Perkins’s accent is dodgy but his jittery persona works surprisingly well for the role. Jimmy (Is the name meant to be a swipe at the infallible persona of James Bond?) is ruthless, paranoid, and possibly sociopathic, which makes him perfect for intelligence work but worthless for almost every thing else.
For tomorrow’s movie a day, Anthony Perkins returns in another British spy film, ffolkes.
It would be difficult to get through October and not point out one of the best scenes in horror ever.
There’s Janet Leigh’s performance which conveyed the utter terror the scene wanted to convey. We have Bernard Hermann’s discordant film score highlighting the attack. Despite being a very bloodless sequence the way Hitchcock filmed the scene made audience imagine that they were actually witnessing something more violent and gory.
We all have Alfred Hitchcock to thank for this most iconic of all horror scenes.
I recently saw the 1970 film WUSA on Movies TV. After I watched it, I looked Joanne Woodward up on Wikipedia specifically to see where she was born. I was surprised to discover that she was born and raised in Georgia and that she attended college in Louisiana.
Why was I so shocked? Because WUSA was set in New Orleans and it featured Joanne Woodward speaking in one of the most worst Southern accents that I had ever heard. A little over an hour into the film, Woodward’s character says, “What’s all the rhubarb?” And while “What’s all the rhu…” sounds properly Southern, the “…barb” was pronounced with the type of harshly unpleasant overemphasis on “ar” that has given away many Northern actors trying to sound Southern. Hence, I was shocked to discover that Joanne Woodward actually was Southern.
That said, her pronunciation of the word rhubarb pretty much summed up every problem that I had with WUSA. Actually, the real problem was that she said “rhubarb” in the first place. It came across as being the type of thing that a Northerner who has never actually been down South would think was regularly uttered down here. And I will admit that WUSA was made 16 years before I was born and so, it’s entirely possible that maybe — way back then — people down South regularly did use the word rhubarb. But, for some reason, I doubt it. I know plenty of old Southern people and I’ve never heard a single one of them say anything about rhubarb.
As for WUSA, it’s a long and slow film. A drifter named Reinhardt (Paul Newman) drifts into New Orleans and, with the help of an old friend who is now pretending to be a priest (Laurence Harvey), Reinhardt gets a job as an announcer at a right-wing radio station. He reads extremist editorials that he doesn’t agree with and whenever anyone challenges him, he explains that he’s just doing his job and nothing matters anyway.
Reinhardt also gets himself an apartment and spends most of his time smoking weed with long-haired musician types, the exact same people that WUSA regularly denounces as being a threat to the American way. Living in the same complex is Geraldine (Joanne Woodward), a former prostitute who has a scar on her face and who says stuff like, “What’s all the rhubarb?” She falls in love with Reinhardt but finds it difficult to ignore what he does for a living.
Meanwhile, Geraldine has another admirer. Rainey (Anthony Perkins) is an idealistic and neurotic social worker who is regularly frustrated by his efforts to do good in the world. Reinhardt makes fun of him. The local crime boss (Moses Gunn) manipulates him. And WUSA infuriates him. When Rainey realizes that WUSA is a part of a plot to elect an extremist governor, Rainey dresses up like a priest and starts carrying around a rifle.
Meanwhile, Reinhardt has been assigned to serve as emcee at a huge patriotic rally. With Geraldine watching from the audience and Rainey wandering around the rafters with his rifle, Reinhardt is finally forced to take a stand about the people that he works for.
Or maybe he isn’t.
To be honest, WUSA is such a mess of a film that, even after the end credits roll, it’s difficult to figure out whether Reinhardt took a stand or not.
Anyway, WUSA is not a lost masterpiece and I really wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. The film’s too long, there’s too many scenes of characters repeating the same thing over and over again, and neither Newman nor Woodward are particularly memorable. (You know a movie is boring when even Paul Newman seems like a dullard.) On the plus side, Anthony Perkins gives such a good performance that I didn’t once think about the Psycho shower scene while watching him.
As boring as WUSA is, I have to admit that I’m a little bit surprised that it hasn’t been rediscovered. Considering that it’s about a right-wing radio station, I’m surprised that there haven’t been hundreds of pretentious think pieces trying to make the connection between WUSA and Fox News. But, honestly, even if those think pieces were out there, it probably wouldn’t do much for WUSA‘s repuation. According to the film’s Wikipedia page, Paul Newman called it, “the most significant film I’ve ever made and the best.” Paul Newman’s opinion aside, WUSA is pretty dire.
“I don’t care if critics like it; I hated it. I can’t like or be objective about films I had a terrible time doing.”
— Tuesday Weld on Pretty Poison (1968)
It’s actually rather depressing to read that Tuesday Weld hates Pretty Poison because it really is an underrated gem, a nifty little thriller that acts as sly satire on youth, conformity, and small town life. The main reason that the film works is because of the performances delivered by both Weld and her co-star, Anthony Perkins.
But then again, when we the viewers think back on a movie, we remember what we saw as a member of the audience and sometimes, we forget that just because a film is fun to watch, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it was enjoyable to make. When actors and other technicians think back on a film they were involved with, they remember the experience of actually making it. Reportedly, Weld did not get along with the director of Pretty Poison and couldn’t wait to get away from him.
Interestingly enough, in Pretty Poison, Tuesday Weld plays a teenage girl who doesn’t get along with her mother and who can’t wait to get away from her. Perhaps being miserable while making Pretty Poison helped Weld to bring a miserable character to life.
Pretty Poison opens with a nervous-looking man named Dennis Pitt (Anthony Perkins) watching a group of high school cheerleaders practicing on a field. His attention is focused on one cheerleader in particular, the blonde Sue Ann Stepanek (Tuesday Weld). Even before the opening credits have ended, the film has established a familiar dynamic. Sue Ann is the fresh-faced example of small town American innocence. Dennis is the type of creepy older guy that every girl has had to deal with at some point in her life. (When I was in high school, there were always guys like Dennis hanging out around the mall. When I was in college, the Dennis Pitts of the world were the guy who still hung out around the dorms even though they hadn’t been a student in a decade.)
Having established this dynamic early on, Pretty Poison spends the rest of its running time turning that dynamic upside down.
Dennis has recently been released from a mental hospital. Under the watchful eye of his parole officer (John Randolph), Dennis gets a mind-numbingly dull job at a local mill and tries to live a normal life. When Dennis finally does get a chance to talk to Sue Anne, he lies to her and tells her that he’s a secret agent and that he’s in town on a mission. Sue Anne responds to Dennis’s awkward flirting and soon, she’s accompanying him on his “missions.” During one such mission near the mill, they’re spotted by a security guard. Sue Anne responds by enthusiastically murdering him.
Yes, the cheerleader’s a sociopath.
Sue Anne’s tyrannical mother (Beverly Garland) does not approve of her relationship with Dennis. Sue Anne wants her mother out of the way and she expects her secret agent boyfriend to help her out…
Pretty Poison is a sharp mix of dark comedy and heightened drama, one that gets progressively darker as it progresses. From the minute the film first shows Sue Anne intensely practicing on that field while Dennis watches her, it’s pretty obvious that the film was meant to be an allegory for American society in 1968. Sue Anne is the perfect, all-American cheerleader who kills people because she can. Dennis is the neurotic outsider who knows that he’ll never be able to get anyone to believe the truth.
And it all works, largely because both Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld are so well-cast. It is, of course, impossible to watch Perkins without first thinking about Psycho but he actually manages to make Dennis into a very different character from Norman Bates. If Norman was a psycho who, at first sight, looked like an innocent, Dennis is an innocent who, at first sight, looks like a psycho. Tuesday Weld, meanwhile, turns Sue Anne into a disturbingly plausible killer, the type who, within minutes, can alternate between moodiness and giddiness, all the while squealing with orgasmic joy while bashing in someone’s head.
Tuesday Weld may hate Pretty Poison but it’s still a pretty good movie.
So, guess what I did this morning? That’s right — I put on a blindfold, a stumbled over to my ever-growing Blu-ray, DVD, and even VHS collection and I randomly selected 12 films!
Why did I do this?
I did it so you, the beloved readers of Through the Shattered Lens, could once again have a chance to tell me what to do. At the end of this post, you’ll find a poll. Hopefully, between now and next Monday (that’s March 24th), a few of you will take the time to vote for which of these 12 films I should watch and review. I will then watch the winner on Tuesday and post my review on Wednesday night. In short, I’m putting the power to dominate in your hands. Just remember: with great power comes great … well, you know how it goes.
Here are the 12 films that I randomly selected this morning:
The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008) — This German film was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. It tells the true life story of the left-wing German terrorist group, The RAF.
The Cat’s Meow(2001) — From director Peter Bogdonavich, this film speculates about the events that led to the shooting of silent film director Thomas H. Ince. Starring Kirsten Dunst as Marion Davies, Edward Herrmann as William Randolph Hearst, and Eddie Izzard as Charlie Chaplin.
Heavenly Creatures (1994) — The close relationship between two teenage girls (Melanie Lynesky and Kate Winslet) leads to both a vibrant fantasy world and real-life murder. Directed by Peter Jackson.
In A Lonely Place(1950) — In this film noir from director Nicholas Ray, Humphrey Bogart plays a screenwriter who may (or may not) be a murderer.
Liquid Sky(1983) — In this low-budget, independent science fiction film, an alien lands in New York and soon several members of the city’s underground art scene are vaporized. Not surprisingly, it all has to do with heroin.
Made in Britain (1983) — A very young Tim Roth makes his debut in this British film. Roth plays Trevor, a Neo-Nazi who — despite being intelligent and charismatic — also seems to be intent on destroying himself and everything that he sees.
Much Ado About Nothing(2013) — In between The Avengers and Agents of SHIELD, Joss Whedon found the time to direct this adaptation of Shakespeare’s play.
Peyton Place(1957) — In this Oscar-nominated film, the sordid secrets of an outwardly idyllic New England town are exposed.
Pretty Poison (1968) — Having just been released from a mental institution, Dennis (Anthony Perkins) finds himself involved with teenager Sue Anne (Tuesday Weld), who — despite her wholesome appearance — is actually psychotic.
Troll 2(1990) — A family moves to Nilbog, a small town that is populated by vegetarian goblins. This movie is widely considered to be one of the worst ever made.
Walkabout (1971) — In this visually stunning Nicolas Roeg film, a teenage girl and her younger brother find themselves stranded and left for dead in the Australian outback. They try to survive with the help of an Aborigine.
Zabriskie Point(1970) — In this 1970 film, the great Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni takes a look at the 60s counter-culture. Airplanes are stolen, buildings explode, and orgies magically materialize in the middle of the desert.
Yesterday, I took a look at Executive Action, a 1973 docudrama about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Today, I want to take a look at another film inspired by the Kennedys, the 1979 satire Winter Kills.
As the film opens, it’s been 16 years since a popular and dynamic President named Tim Kegan was assassinated in Philadelphia. Despite constant rumors of conspiracy, the official story is that Kegan was killed by a lone gunman and that gunman was subsequently killed by another lone assassin. The President’s half-brother, Nick (played by Jeff Bridges, who looks so impossibly young and handsome in this film), has disappointed his father (John Huston) by declining to follow his brother into politics. Instead, he spends most of his time sailing on corporate oil tankers and dating fashion editor Yvette (Belinda Bauer). This all changes when a dying man named Fletcher (and played, underneath a lot of bandages, by Joe Spinell) asks for a chance to speak to Nick. Fletcher reveals that he was the 2nd gunman and that he was hired by to kill President Kegan. Before dying, Fletcher tells Nick where he can find the rifle that was used to kill the President.
Following Fletcher’s directions, Nick finds both the rifle and proof that his brother’s death was the result of a conspiracy. Determined to find out who was truly behind the conspiracy, Nick goes to see his father, the flamboyant tycoon Pa Kegan (John Huston) who, we discover, is only alive because he frequently gets blood transfusions from young women. With Pa’s encouragement, Nick is sent on an increasingly bizarre odyssey into the darkest shadows of America, a world that is populated by militaristic businessmen, sinister gangsters, and an unemotional man named John Cerutti (Anthony Perkins) who very well may be the most powerful man in the world.
The martyred President might be named Tim Kegan, his accused assassin might be named Willie Abbott, and the man who shot Abbott might be named Joe Diamond (and might be played by Eli Wallach) but make no mistake about it — Winter Kills is a thinly disguised look at both the Kennedy assassination and the Kennedy family. Based on a novel by Richard Condon (who also wrote the conspiracy classic, The Manchurian Candidate), Winter Kills takes all of the various Kennedy conspiracy theories and intentionally pushes them to their most ludicrous extremes. The end result is a film that tries (and occasionally manages) to be both absurd and sincere, a portrait of a world where paranoia is the only logical reaction.
As I discovered from listening to director William Richert’s commentary on the Anchor Bay DVD, Winter Kills had a long and complicated production history. The film was produced by two marijuana dealers, one of whom was murdered by the Mafia shortly after the film premiered while the other would later be sentenced to 40 years in prison on federal drug charges. The production actually went bankrupt more than a few times, which led to Richert, Bridges, and Bauer making and releasing another film specifically so they could raise the money to finish Winter Kills.
When Winter Kills was finally released, it got a good deal of attention because of its spectacular cast. Along with Bridges, Huston, Perkins, and Wallach, the film also features cameo appearances by Tomas Milian, Elizabeth Taylor, Ralph Meeker, Richard Boone, Sterling Hayden, Dorothy Malone, Toshiro Mifune, and a host of other actors who will be familiar to those of us who enjoy watching old movies on TCM. And yet, according to Richert, the film itself was barely released in to theaters, the implication being that Winter Kills was a film about conspiracies that fell victim to a conspiracy itself.
Given the film’s history and the subject matter, I was really hoping that Winter Kills would turn out to be a great movie. Unfortunately, it really doesn’t work. The film struggles to maintain a balance between suspense and satire and, as a result, the suspense is never convincing and the satire is ultimately so obvious that it ends up being more annoying than thought-provoking. The cast may be impressive but they’re used in such a way that film ultimately feels like it’s just a collection of showy celebrity cameos as opposed to being an actual story.
That said, Winter Kills remains an interesting misfire. Jeff Bridges is a likable and compelling lead (and he gives the film much-needed focus) and, playing a role that has a lot in common with his better known work in Chinatown, John Huston is a always watchable if not necessaily likable. Best of all is Anthony Perkins, who plays a role that, in light of what we now know about the NSA, seems oddly prophetic.
Finally, best of all, Winter Kills remains an interesting time capsule. If nothing else, it reminds us that mistrust and paranoia are not unique to this century.
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.
Sweet and repressed Amy (Madchen Amick) is a college student who has too much on her plate. She has to take care of her greedy grandmother (Natalie Schaefer, of Gilligan’s Island fame). She has to read a book for her study partner (Corey Parker). She has to sew a dress for her older sister, Gloria (Daisy Hall). She has to find props for the school play. It is her search for props that leads to her buying an old chest at an estate sale. Inside the chest is a red cloak. Amy turns the red cloak into a dress but what she does not know is that the red cloak was previously won by Aztec priests while they conducted human sacrifices. As Professor Buchanan (Anthony Perkins) later explains, anyone who wears the dress will be driven to do evil.
