Hi there and Happy October 8th! For today’s treat from the ranks of horror films that have fallen into the public domain, I present to you one of the most important films in horror history. Though it wasn’t appreciated when it was first released back in 1964, The Last Man On Earth was not only the 1st Italian horror film but George Romero has also acknowledged it as an influence on his own Night of the Living Dead.
It’s easy to be a little bit dismissive of The Last Man On Earth. After all, the low-budget is obvious in every scene, the dubbing is off even by the standards of Italian horror, and just the name “Vincent Price” in the credits leads one to suspect that this will be another campy, B-movie. Perhaps that’s why I’m always surprised to rediscover that, taking all things into consideration, this is actually a pretty effective film. Price does have a few over-the-top moments but, for the most part, he gives one of his better performances here and the black-and-white images have an isolated, desolate starkness to them that go a long way towards making this film’s apocalypse a convincing one. The mass cremation scene always leaves me feeling rather uneasy.
The film is based on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and no, it’s nowhere as good as the book. However, it’s still a worthy adaptation and one that stays true to the tone of the text, including the fact that Price’s main tormenter was also once his neighbor and best friend. This is one of those films that just hits differently in the wake of 2020’s COVID hysteria.
If you have 87 minutes to kill, please enjoy The Last Man On The Earth.
This 1980 film takes place in the town of Hurrah, Iowa. One of the opening scenes features Pastor David Whitcomb driving up to Hurrah and stepping out of his car to take a look at the city limits sign. Hurrah has a population of a little over 3,000. Apparently, almost all of them belong to the same church and everyone works for the same factory.
Unfortunately, the owner of the factor is not a member of the church. In fact, onery old Phil Esteen (say the same quickly) is determined to shut the church down by scheduling everyone to work on Sundays. As a result, hardly anyone is able to attend any of Pastor Whitcomb’s sermons. The pastor finds himself preaching to a church that is full of children whose parents are working at Esteen’s factory. When people complain about Esteen’s tactics, Esteen threatens to move his company to the nearby town of Riverton, which apparently has a river. Phil Esteeen loves to talk about that river.
Whitcomb is upset to discover that people in his church hate Esteen and view him as being unredeemable. Whitcomb says that’s not a good attitude. A huge reason why people have that attitude is because there’s a group of demons living in the church basement. (They may be demons but essentially, they just look like a bunch of community theater actors wearing red shirts.) They’ve been tasked with making the pastor’s life difficult. The demons have a bulky personal computer that they use to type up their evil plans and which they occasionally turn to for advice. The computer itself is treated as being a sort of exotic oddity. One gets the feeling that 1980 audiences were expected to look at the computer and think, “What type of twisted creature would actually travel with one of those things!?”
When the women of the church lead a protest against Esteen’s business practices, it just makes Esteen all the more determined to keep people working on Sundays. Pastor Whitcomb realizes he’s going to have to try something different to reach Esteen and convince him to change his ways. Can he do it?
(Personally, I think the whole problem could have been solved by the employees forming a union or all quitting at the same time or maybe the church holding more than one service during the day. My point is that there seemed to be many potential solutions that no one in this film ever considered….)
This was one of director Russell Doughten’s do-it-yourself regional productions. He directed and self-distributed several of these films in the 70s and 80s. Seen today, this films are grainy time capsules of the distant past. Doughten’s didn’t exactly make films that featured nuanced discussions of theological issues. He was frequently a heavy-handed filmmaker, working in a genre that was specifically designed to be magnify those self-righteous impulses. At the same time, there’s something undeniably charming about just how cheap most of his Iowa-shot films looked and just how enthusiastically they were acted by their largely amateur casts. (And yes, the term to remember is “enthusiastically” as opposed to “convincingly.”) Much as with Ed Wood, Doughten’s appeal is less about his films and more about his refusal to let a lack of funds or a lack of talent stand in the way of bringing his vision to the screen. A film like Whitcomb’s War has a ton of technical flaws but seen today, it’s definitely a time capsule of the era in which it was made. Watching it means taking a trip to the past, to an era when computers were still exotic and even the Devil had to use a landline phone to communicate with people.
Incidentally, I did a google search and apparently, the town of Hurrah, Iowa no longer exists. Maybe everyone moved closer to the river after all.
Except these students aren’t going to prom. Instead, they’re going to have a party all their own. They’re heading out to a house with quite a history, the perfect place to have a night that they’ll never forget. And a night that they’ll be lucky to …. SURVIVE!
There. Was that cheesy enough?
If my introduction was a bit over-the-top, it fits the general mood of 2017’s Party Night. Party Night is a deliberate throwback to the slasher films of the 80s and the early 90s, before the genre started to take itself a bit too seriously. (The worse thing that ever happened to the slasher genre is that a few of the films started to get positive reviews from critics who praised them for being subversive. The end result of all that was David Gordon Green changing Michael Myers from a nightmarish boogeyman to just another buffoon living in a sewer.) As such, Party Night is a film where a bunch of attractive young people go to a place that common sense say they shouldn’t go to. And then they proceed to the dumbest things possible, like wander off by themselves. The joy of the film comes from yelling at the screen, “Don’t do that, you idiot!” and then discovering that you were right to warn them not to do what they did.
I’ve made this point before but it is worth repeating. The common complaint with most old school slasher films is that they feature characters who do stupid things. That’s a valid comment but, to be honest, most people are pretty stupid. And when you’re a teenager and it’s prom night and you’re hanging out with your best friends, you’re going to be even more stupid than usual. In my case, when I sit there and roll my eyes at the girl in a slasher movie who wanders around outside in her underwear in the middle of the night, it’s because I’m trying to forget about all the times that I’ve walked up and down the alley in my sleepshirt, socks, and bathrobe while looking for the cat at two in the morning. The fact of the matter is that we all do stupid things. Some people do stupid things because they’re stupid. Some people do stupid things because it’s just easier and takes less effort. (In my case, it was more convenient to just throw on a bathrobe before I went out to look for the cat as opposed to actually taking the time to put on …. well, clothes.) We recognize our stupidity in the characters who populate the slasher films of the 70s and 80s. And the reason why so many people instinctively make fun of those films is because they know they would not survive an old school slasher film. Myself, I’d probably be dead within the first fifteen minutes.
As for Party Night, it’s a low-budget film with a simple plot and an enthusiastic cast and an obvious love for the genre. Fans of old school slasher films will appreciate the way the story pays homage to the films of the past. It’s a film that understands that, at a certain age, everyone’s too stupid to survive a horror movie.
Within the first five minutes, the film features not only a training montage but also a scene where a family cheering good news immediately gets a phone call delivering bad news. (“SHUT UP!” our hero yells at his friends and family.) By the time the film hits the five minute mark, it has managed to denounce communism, terrorism, laziness, and drunk driving! And that’s even before James Spader shows up as a cocaine-sniffing teenage crime lord!
First released in 1986 and directed by the same guy who did the first Friday the 13th, The New Kids tells the story of Loren (Shannon Presby) and his sister, Abby (Lori Loughlin). Their father (Tom Atkins) was a badass army colonel who fought communists, received commendations from the President (and that President was Ronald Reagan so you know those commendations were for doing something cool and not just for posting memes on twitter), and who taught his children self-defense. Every morning, he exercised with them and drilled into their heads the importance of being disciplined and willing to stand up for themselves. Sadly, their father and mother were both killed in a car accident after meeting with President Reagan at the White House.
Though they’ve been taught how to survive in the world by an expert, Loren and Abby are both teenagers and the law says that they need adult supervision. They move down to Florida and stay with their Uncle Charlie (Eddie Jones), Charlie owns a run-down amusement park that he’s decided to call Santa Land. He figures that tourists who are driving to “Walt Disney World and Epcot” will want to stop off at Santa Land. Personally, I think the tourists will probably want to keep driving to where they actually want to go but who knows? Uncle Charlie does have a petting zoo and there is something oddly charming about the idea of Santa hanging out in the bayous of Florida. I mean, there’s a reason why Santa Claus And The Ice Cream Bunny is beloved by viewers all over the world.
At the high school, everyone notices Loren and Abby. Abby gets a dorky boyfriend named Mark (Eric Stoltz …. no, really!) and Loren starts dating the sheriff’s daughter, Karen (Paige Lynn Price). Unfortunately, the new kids have been noticed by Eddie Dutra (James Spader) and his gang of inbred rednecks. Dutra and his gang deal drugs and have a pit bull who they’re hoping to enter into dog fights. (“Went straight for the jugular,” one gang member says at one point.) Dutra decides that he likes Abby, which leads to Loren getting protective, which leads to Dutra and the boys waging their own war on Abby and Loren and everything eventually comes to a deeply satisfying Straw Dogs-style conclusion at Santa Land.
The New Kids is one of those films that succeeds by being thoroughly absurd and over-the-top. Dutra and his gang aren’t just evil. Instead, they’re downright Satanic in their determination to destroy the new kids. The gang is fearsome enough, especially Gordo (Theron Montgomery), who is the fat future forklift operator from Hell. But what really makes this gang memorable is the fact that their leader is James Spader, with bright blonde hair, a smooth Southern accent, and moves that are so assured that he sometimes seem to be dancing across the screen. Dutra’s evil and the cocaine that he snorts leads to him making some bad decisions but he’s got style. As for the New Kids, Shannon Presby is a bit bland as Loren but that blandness actually provides a nice contrast to Spader’s more flamboyant performance. Lori Loughlin is likable and kicks Gordo in the balls, which is pretty cool. (Gordo more than deserved it.)
Cheerfully sleazy and unapologetically ridiculous, The New Kids is 80s exploitation cinema at its best.
I can’t let this Horrorthon pass without sharing a scene featuring one of my favorite horror movie characters, the Whishmater (Andrew Divoff)!
In the scene, from 1999’s Wishmaster 2, our favorite literal-minded Djinn grants another wish to someone who did not choose his words carefully. Andrew Divoff really makes this scene work. That smile is a thing of terrifying wonders.
It’s not known, for sure, how many people Lonnie David Franklin killed.
A residenct of Los Angeles and a former enlistee of the U.S. Army who was given a dishonorable discharge after doing time in prison for taking part in the gang-rape of a 17 year-old girl in Germany, Franklin was convicted of 10 murders but he was suspected of much more. His earliest known murder was committed in 1984 and he was apparently very active up until 1988. Then, much like the BTK Killer, Franklin appears to have taken a break for nearly two decades before returning to his murderous ways in 2002. (It could be just as likely that Franklin was still killing but his victims were either not discovered or he was never linked to the crimes.) Franklin’s murders didn’t get much attention, with the police not acknowledging that they were dealing with a serial killer until 2007. Some of that can be blamed on the fact that many of Franklin’s murders were committed before DNA testing became a commonplace thing. However, it has also been acknowledged that Franklin escaped detection because he targeted black women and tended to prey on sex workers, neither one of whom were a priority for the LAPD in the 80s.
2014’s The Grim Sleeper stars Dreama Walker as Christine Pelisek, the journalist who first reported on the existence of the Grim Sleeper and Ernie Hudson and Michael O’Neill as the detectives who investigated the murders and ultimately arrested Lonnie Franklin. Franklin (played by James R. Baylis) only appears briefly in the film. As The Grim Sleeper was made before Franklin had actually been convicted and sentenced to death for his crimes, the film does not actually state that the police arrested the right man. Indeed, the film discusses very little about the man who was arrested for the crimes.
Instead, the film focuses on Pelisek and her attempts to get someone to take her seriously when she argues that there’s a serial killer on the loose and that the public has a right to know. At first, everyone is skeptical of her claims. Her editor tells her that she doesn’t have enough for a story. The police tell her to mind her own business. Her fellow reporters order her to get coffee. The only people who really support Pelisek’s attempts to uncover the truth are the families of the victims, some of whom have spent over twenty years waiting for someone to tell them what happened to their loved ones.
The film is at its best when it focuses on the pain of the families, all of whom feel that they have been ignored and forgotten by the people who are supposed to be protecting them. It’s at its least interesting when it focuses on Pelisek and her efforts to be taken seriously. (Deama Walker has given good performances in films like Compliance and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood but she’s miscast here.) Though flawed, the film honors the memories of those victimized by the Grim Sleeper and it reminds viewers that no one should be forgotten.
As for the real Grim Sleeper, he died suddenly while on Death Row. The cause of death has never been released but he died in March of 2020, around the same time that COVID was spreading throughout the nation’s prisons and I’ve always assumed that he was an early fatality. Regardless of the cause, the Sleeper met the Reaper and will never awaken again.
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 Tod Browning, who started his career during the silent era, ended it in the sound era, and was responsible for some of the most important horror and suspense films of both eras!
4 Shots From 4 Tod Browning Films
West of Zanzibar (1928, dir by Tod Browning, DP: Percy Hilburn)
Dracula (1931, Dir by Tod Browning, DP: Karl Freund)
Freaks (1932, dir by Tod Browning, DP: Merritt Gerstad)
Mark of the Vampire (1935, Dir by Tod Browning, DP: James Wong Howe)
In 1989’s Godzilla vs Biollante, Godzilla returns and gets into a fight with a giant plant named Biollante. Created by mixing plant cells with Godzilla cells and the cells of one human who was killed in a terrorist attack, Biollante has the body of a monster, the head of a giant rose, and the soul of a human. In fact, because her cells were used to help create Biollante, the late Erika Shiragami (Yusko Sawaguchi) can telepathically communicate from inside of Billante.
Now, you might be tempted to laugh at all of that but, silly origin story aside, Biollante is actually a wonderful creation and a fierce competitor to Godzilla. As Biollante was created using DNA that Godzilla left behind during his previous rampage of Tokyo, Godzilla and Biollante have a bit of a mental connection. One could even argue that this film features Godzilla fighting a mutated version of himself. (This was a theme to which many of the future Godzilla films would return.) Biollante is not only capable of wrapping monsters, things, and people in its tendrils but it’s also implied to literally be immortal. Damaging Biollante just causes it to release spores that presumably will lead to the creation of a new Biollante.
How did Biollante come into existence? As usual, it’s all the fault of the government and the corporations. Following Godzilla’s previous rampage in Japan, the government of the Middle Eastern nation of Saradia demanded some of Godzilla’s cells so that they could experiment with creating plant life that could survive in the desert. Meanwhile, an American company called Bio-Major decided that it wanted the cells for itself and they even sent over terrorists to blow up a Saradian lab, leading to the death of Erika and the apparent madness of her father, Dr. Genichiro Shiragami (Koji Takahashi). Dr. Shiragami fused Erika’s cells with the cells of one of the Godzilla plants and Biollatne was created….
Yeah, it doesn’t always make a lot of sense. That’s to be expected of a Godzilla film, though. The important thing is that, no matter how ludicrous the plot, the cast delivers their lines with enough skill and conviction that the viewer is willing to accept what’s being said without worrying too much about the logic behind it. There’s definitely a political subtext here for those who want to find it. Japan once again finds itself saving the world from the mistakes made by America and, this time, the Middle East. For Japan, every Godzilla rampage is a tragedy. For America and the rest of the world, it’s an economic opportunity. Just as the rest of the world reacted to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by saying, “Cool, we’ve got to figure out how to do that!,” the world reacts to over 30 years of Godzilla-led death and destruction by trying to figure out how to create their own Godzilla.
There’s a lot going on in Godzilla vs Biollante. Psychic Miki Saegusa (Megumi Odaka) makes her first appearance in the Godzilla franchise. There’s a fear assassin named SSS9 (Majot Bedi) who pops up throughout the movie so that he can shoot people. There are scenes of corporate espionage and car chases and action sequences featuring a lot of gunfire. This is one of the more violent and fast-paced Godzilla films that I’ve watched. In the end, though, the main attraction is watching Godzilla battle a giant plant and both Godzilla and Biollante acquit themselves well. It makes for an exciting film, one that feels worthy of starring the King of the Monsters.
The 1958 film, The Bride and the Beast, tells the story of newlyweds Dan (Lance Fuller) and Laura Fuller (Charlotte Austin). Dan is an overly macho and chauvinistic big game hunter who is so into hunting and capturing animals that he even keeps a gorilla named Sparky in the basement of his home. I’m not really sure that’s legal and, even if it is, the logistics of keeping a gorilla in your home seem like they would be beyond the capabilities of moron like Dan. Then again, when Sparky gets loose and tries to attack Laura, Dan is forced to shoot him. So, I guess the movie was kind enough to prove my point.
Laura, though grateful to be alive, cannot stop thinking about Sparky and soon, she’s having dreams about her past life as a gorilla. Because Dan doesn’t believe that his wife was once a gorilla, he takes her to the jungles of Africa for their honeymoon. While Dan proves himself to be not quite the ideal romantic husband by keeping himself busy by hunting a killer tiger, Laura finds herself being drawn back to her former existence as the Queen of the Gorillas. Dan may be able to save his camp from the tiger but will he be able to save his wife from the primates that want her for their bride? And will Laura maybe be smart enough to realize that a normal husband would not react to his new bride hatred of hunting for forcing her to go on a safari for her honeymoon? I mean, really, everything that happens in this film is pretty much Dan’s fault. Here’s hoping that Laura divorced him and married a smarter 50s hero. Like maybe Jeff the pilot from Plan 9 From Outer Space. Now that was a man!
This very low-budget film, which is full of stock footage and sets that wobble whenever any of the actors bump into them, has gained some attention in recent years because the script was written by Edward D. Wood, Jr. As such, there’s a scene in which Laura undergoes hypnosis and delivers a monologue about how much she loves her angora sweater. (“It felt like the fur of a small kitten.”) The nonsensical plot and dialogue could only have come from Ed Wood. Unfortunately, Wood himself didn’t direct the film. That job falls to Adrian Weiss and, as a result, the film’s direction doesn’t feature any of the quirky weirdness that one typically associates with a Wood production. The film gets off to a good start, with Dan revealing that he keeps a gorilla in his basement and coming across like some sort of mad scientist but, once the action moves to the jungle, things start to drag as Weiss takes a bland and workmanlike approach to a story that demanded a more imaginative approach.
The film does conclude on an enjoyably odd note, one in which overly macho Dan discovers that it takes more than a rifle and a hunting hat to be king of the jungle. In the end, though, this film is mostly just for Ed Wood completists.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in hosting a few weekly live tweets on twitter and occasion ally Mastodon. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of Mastodon’s #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We snark our way through it.
Tonight, for #MondayActionMovie, the film will be The Lawnman, which is actually a 2012 film called Safe that has been uploaded to YouTube under a totally different name.
Then, on twitter, #MondayMuggers will be showing 1988’s The Naked Gun, starring Leslie Nielsen! The film is on Prime and it starts at 10 pm et!
It should make for a night of fun viewing and I invite all of you to join in. If you want to join the live tweets, just hop onto Mastodon, pull up The Lawman on YouTube, start the movie at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag! Then switch over to twitter, pull The Naked Gun up on Prime, and use the #MondayMuggers hashtag!
Through the Shattered Lens 