(It’s tradition here at the Lens that, every October, we watch the original Little Shop of Horrors. And always, I start things off by telling this story…)
Enter singing.
Little Shop…Little Shop of Horrors…Little Shop…Little Shop of Terrors…
Hi! Good morning and Happy October 29th! For today’s plunge into the world of public domain horror films, I’d like to present you with a true classic. From 1960, it’s the original Little Shop of Horrors!
When I was 19 years old, I was in a community theater production of the musical Little Shop of Horrors. Though I think I would have made the perfect Audrey, everybody always snickered whenever I sang so I ended up as a part of “the ensemble.” Being in the ensemble basically meant that I spent a lot of time dancing and showing off lots of cleavage. And you know what? The girl who did play Audrey was screechy, off-key, and annoying and after every show, all the old people in the audience always came back stage and ignored her and went straight over to me. So there.
Anyway, during rehearsals, our director thought it would be so funny if we all watched the original film. Now, I’m sorry to say, much like just about everyone else in the cast, this was my first exposure to the original and I even had to be told that the masochistic dentist patient was being played by Jack Nicholson. However, I’m also very proud to say that — out of that entire cast — I’m the only one who understood that the zero-budget film I was watching was actually better than the big spectacle we were attempting to perform on stage. Certainly, I understood the film better than that screechy little thing that was playing Audrey.
The first Little Shop of Horrors certainly isn’t scary and there’s nobody singing about somewhere that’s green (I always tear up when I hear that song, by the way). However, it is a very, very funny film with the just the right amount of a dark streak to make it perfect Halloween viewing.
So, if you have 72 minutes to kill, check out the original and the best Little Shop of Horrors…
The 1989 film, Wicked Stepmother, was Bette Davis’s final film. She was cast as Miranda, an enigmatic woman who meets and marries a man named Sam (Lionel Stander). Sam’s daughter, Jenny (Colleen Camp) and her husband, Steve (David Rasche), are stunned to come home from a vacation just to discover Miranda living in their house. Miranda chain-smokes, despite Jenny and Steve asking her not to. Miranda cooks and eats meat, despite Jenny being a vegetarian. Miranda brags about her sex life which freaks Jenny out even though I suppose really old people do occasionally have sex. When it becomes apparent that Miranda is a witch who seduces and shrinks her victims, Jenny decides that something must be done.
Wicked Stepmother was not only Bette Davis’s last starring role but it was also the last production that she ever walked out on. Early on in filming, she announced that she didn’t like the script, she didn’t like the way she was being filmed, and that she didn’t like the director, venerable B-move maestro Larry Cohen. For his part, Cohen said that Davis left the movie because she was in bad health but she didn’t want to announce that to the world. In Cohen’s defense, Davis does appear to be rather frail in the movie and often seems to be having trouble speaking. (Davis has a stroke a few years before appearing in Wicked Stepmother.) Davis died just a few months after Wicker Stepmother was released so I tend to assume that Cohen was correct when he said that the main reason Davis left the film was because of her health. That doesn’t mean the script wasn’t bad, of course. But, in the latter part of her career, Davis appeared in a lot of badly written movies. She did Burnt Offerings, afterall.
Regardless of why she left, Davis’s absence did require that Wicked Stepmother work around her character. But how do you do that when Bette Davis was literally the title character? This film’s solution was to bring in Barbara Carrerra as Priscilla, Miranda’s daughter. It turns out that Miranda and Priscilla both inhabit the body of a cat but only one of them can use the body at a time. So, when Priscilla is in the cat, Miranda is among the humans. When Miranda is in the cat, Priscilla is …. well, you get the idea. In the film, Priscilla leaves the body of the cat and then refuses to reeneter it because “I’m having too much fun.” So, whenever we see the cat glaring in the background, we’re meant to assume that we’re actually seeing Miranda in the background.
Got it?
Now, believe it or not, the whole thing with the cat is probably the least confusing thing about Wicked Stepmother. Jenny can’t convince Steve that Miranda and Priscilla are actually witches. Steve actually has sex with Pricilla and is shocked when Priscilla starts to turn into a cat but the whole incident is never mentioned again and Steve quickly goes from being an adulterous jerk to a loyal husband. Sam goes on a game show and, with Priscilla’s help, wins a lot of money even though the questions that he answered were so simple that he shouldn’t have needed the help of a witch’s spell. (“Who won the election of 1876?” is one question. The correct answer, by the way, is Rutherford B. Hayes. Screw you, Samuel Tilden.) Jenny gets some help from a cop, a private detective, and a priestess of some sort. The whole thing ends with a big magical battle that involves Barbara Carrera mouthing pre-recorded Bette Davis dialogue.
None of it makes any sense. The special effects are incredibly cut-rate. It’s hard not to regret that Bette Davis didn’t go out on a better film. And yet, when taken on its own terms, Wicked Stepmother itself is oddly likable. Colleen Camp is sympathetic as Jenny, which is saying something when you consider that Jenny is written to be a humorless vegetarian. Lionel Stander appears to be having fun as Sam. Larry Cohen was a good-enough director that, even though he couldn’t save the film from its own bad script and miniscule budget, the movie itself is never boring. It’s cheap and stupid but its watchable in the same way that Michael Scott’s Threat Level Midnight was watchable. It may not be particularly good but you just can’t look away.
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 or Netflix? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!
Oh Lord.
So, if you were having trouble getting too sleep last night, you could have turned over to one of the many Showtime channels you could have watched the 2006 film, Ira & Abby.
I doubt it would have helped though. Ira & Abby is one of those extremely cutesy little love stories where a neurotic guy meets a quirky woman and they spend the entire film having so many easily solved relationship problems that it’ll drive your anxiety through the roof just watching them.
Ira (Chris Messina) is the son of two psychologists (Judith Light and Robert Klein). Ira is planning on becoming a psychologist himself and, of course, he’s in therapy. At the start of the film, his therapist tells him that he’s beyond help and that he needs to do something spontaneous for once. Ira takes this to mean that he should go the gym.
At the gym, Ira meets Abby (Jennifer Westfeldt), who is quirky and universally beloved by everyone who meets her. (Westfeldt also wrote the script, which …. might explain a little.) Abby has a positive attitude and lives with her musician parents (Fred Willard and Frances Conroy). After Ira sees Abby somehow talk a mugger out of robbing everyone on a subway car, he decides that they have to get married. Free-spirited Abby agrees.
Marriage follows! Complications follow! Annulment and remarriage and more follows! Everyone ends up seeing a different therapist while, at the same time, Ira’s mom has an affair with Abby’s dad. And yes, it eventually does end with every character in the film gathering in one room and taking part in a giant therapy session. It’s exhausting to watch, largely because it just seems like all of the problems could be solved by people not being stupid or foolishly impulsive. Ira is neurotic to the point of no longer being sympathetic. Abby is so perfect and wonderful that you soon get sick of her and her positive attitude. Even Ted Lasso would tell her to turn it down a notch.
The most frustrating thing about the movie is that it features good actors like Chis Messina but it goes out of its way to sabotage them every chance that it gets. Out of the large and impressive cast, only Fred Willard and Judith Light manage to transcend the script. I would have loved to have watched a movie just about their characters.
I’ve never really had much of a problem with clowns, beyond the fact that some of them really do need to learn how apply lipstick without getting it all over their face. That said, two years ago, I watched the 2016 horror film, Terrifier, on Netflix and I now totally understand why some of my friends are totally terrified of the grinning men in the white makeup. I mean, I will send a Pennywise GIF to my clownphobic friends without even worrying about what damage I may or may not be doing to their mental well-being but I can guarantee you right now that I will never send any of them a picture of Art the Clown.
Art the Clown
Art (who is played by David Howard Thornton) is the clown at the center of Terrifier and, as you can tell from looking at the picture above, he’s not exactly a clown that you want to meet in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, over the course of the film, several innocent people do just that. There’s the homeless woman who meets him in an abandoned building. There’s the two drunk girls who, after leaving a Halloween party, make the mistake of laughing at Art. There’s the owner of the pizzeria who makes the mistake of kicking Art out of his establishment. Art, it turns out, doesn’t deal well with rejection. It also turns out that Art can turn just about anything into a deadly weapon. (We also later learn that Art just happens to have a chainsaw. Agck!)
Art doesn’t speak. We never learn where Art came from and why he insists on killing everyone that he meets. This lack of motivation makes Art a very scary clown indeed. We can only assume that he kills because he’s evil and, being a creature of pure evil, there’s really no way to reason with him or to rationalize his actions. Art is pure chaos released into the world and, as a result, he’s terrifying. If nothing else, Terrifier is a film that lives up to its name.
Director Damien Leone made Terrifier with a budget of a $100,000 and he uses that low budget to his advantage. The deserted building where Art stalks the majority of his victims is a genuinely atmospheric location and, even if they were done cheaply, the gore effects are disturbingly nightmarish. Fortunately, Leone gets some good performances from his cast, which makes the film all the more frightening. David Howard Thornton has enough presence to make Art the Clown intimidating, even when he’s just standing still and staring at nothing. As the film’s “final girl,” Samantha Scaffidi gives a likable and relatable performance. Wisely, the film neither turns her into a super warrior nor a simpering fool. Instead, she’s just a normal person trying to survive the night, much like those of us watching the film in what we hope is the safety of our own home.
Terrifier is an effectively scary little slasher film. It’s not for everyone, of course. It’s a film for horror fans and it has little interest in reaching out to people who don’t normally enjoy the genre. The violence is brutal and the film doesn’t shy away from gore. Those of you who easily fall prey to nightmares may want to stay away. As for those of you who are scared of clowns …. well, Terrifier will prove the correctness of your phobia. Seriously, if clowns scare you, don’t watch this movie. It’ll be safer for you just to watch It again….
A Hero, which is the latest film from Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, was one of the most acclaimed films to play at Cannes this year and its release has definitely been highly anticipated here in the States. The film deals with a man who has been imprisoned for being unable to pay a debt. When he gets a two-day leave, he tries to convince the man to whom he owes money to forgive the debt. Apparently, things do not go as planned.
A Hero is Iran’s official entry for this year’s Best International Film Oscar. It will be released in the U.S. in early January of 2022.
At this point, it seems pretty clear that Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci is either going to be:
A complete mess
or
2. A whole lot of sordid fun.
My personal hope is that it will be both. With The Last Duel struggling at the box office, it’s also probably that House of Gucci is going to be Scott’s main Oscar contender this year. It certainly seems likely to pick up a hair and makeup nomination, if just for making Jared Leto look like Jeffrey Tambor.
The 2nd trailer for House of Gucci dropped today. And here it is!
Today’s horror scene that I love is from Mario Bava’s 1963 classic, Black Sabbath. The dead are a lot more difficult to get rid of than you might think.
O Canada! Our home and native land! True patriot love in all of us command. With glowing hearts we see thee rise, The True North strong and free! From far and wide, O Canada, we stand on guard for thee. God keep our land glorious and free! O Canada, we stand on guard for thee. O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
Canada! It always seems like such a nice country until you watch a David Cronenberg film. Hailing from Toronto, Cronenberg started his film career with two satirical, black-and-white science fiction shorts and then went on to become one of Canada’s best-known filmmakers. At a time when most people associated Canada with politeness and maple syrup, Cronenberg made visceral and often-disturbing films, ones that often mixed sexuality with graphic body horror. At a time when the genre was being dominated by Italian filmmakers, Cronenberg brought a uniquely Canadian sensibility to horror.
Take 1979’s The Brood, for instance.
The Brood tells the story of one very doomed marriage. Frank (Art Hindle) and Nola (Samantha Eggar) Carveth are fighting for custody of their five year-old daughter, Candice (Cindy Hinds). (Not coincidentally, Cronenberg was going through his own custody battle when he first came up with the idea for The Brood.) Nola, who has been emotionally scarred by both her alcoholic parents and her troubled marriage to Frank, is a patient at Somafree Institute. Her psychotherapist, Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed), practices a technique called “psychoplasmics.” Though it’s not easy to describe (and, wisely, Cronenberg doesn’t spend too much time trying to justify the science of it), it basically involves channeling anger and suppressed emotions into body modification. What you or I might consider to be a hive or a welt is what Dr. Raglan would call a major breakthrough.
Frank is skeptical about Dr. Raglan’s theories but he still takes Candice to visit her mom. However, when Candice returns from one visit bruised and scratched, Frank is convinced that Nola has been abusing her. Hoping to both win custody of Candice and prove that Dr. Raglan’s methods are dangerous, Frank starts his own investigation into just what exactly has been happening at the Somafree Institute.
That’s when the children start to show up. The children are small, with pale skin and light hair and oddly featureless faces. They never smile. They never speak. They show up without any warning and violence always seems to follow them. They attack both Nola’s mother and father. When Nola suspects that Frank might be having an affair with Candice’s teacher, two of the children suddenly appear in her classroom. Candice is scared of the children but still seems to have some sort of connection to them…
Even if you didn’t know this was a Cronenberg film, it would take just one look at the snow-covered landscape to identify The Brood as being a Canadian film. As was often the case with Cronenberg’s early horror films, the imagery is frequently cold and chilly. However, The Brood is not a cold film. With its look at dysfunctional families and its emphasis on Frank’s attempts to protect his daughter, The Brood is actually one of Cronenberg’s most emotional films. It’s a film about not only anger but also how people deal with that anger. The killer kids are both literally and metaphorically children of rage.
Even by the standards of Cronenberg, things get grotesque. Fortunately, the film’s talented cast keeps you interested, even when the bloody visuals might make you want to find a nice comedy to watch instead. Art Hindle and Cindy Hinds are sympathetic as the father and daughter. Oliver Reed keeps you guessing as to what exactly Dr. Raglan is actually trying to accomplish. Nicholas Campbell and Robert A. Silverman, two members of the Cronenberg stock company, both make an impression in smallish roles. And Samantha Eggar totally throws herself into her role, turning Nola into an absolutely terrifying monster.
Though it never quite reaches the flamboyant heights of either Scanners or Shivers, The Brood is still an effective horror film. As opposed to some of his other films of the period, Cronenberg actually seems to not only care about the characters in the film but it also comfortable with encouraging us to care about them as well. As a result, The Brood becomes about more than just trying to shock the audience. The Brood is a film that sticks with you.
The Brood (1979, dir by David Cronenberg DP: Mark Irwin)
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!
Today, we pay tribute to one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, the one and only Mario Bava! It’s time for….
Through the Shattered Lens 