Tag Archives: Frank De Felitta

The TSL’s Horror Grindhouse: Scissors (dir by Frank De Felitta)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The plot of the 1991 film, Scissors, is not easy to describe. That’s not because the plot is particularly clever as much as it’s because it doesn’t make much sense.

Basically, Sharon Stone plays a woman named Angela Anderson. She is oddly obsessed with scissors and terrified about getting close to anyone. She’s been getting hypnotherapy from Dr. Carter (Ronny Cox) in an effort to understand why she’s so repressed but she doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere. This could possibly have something to do with the fact that Dr. Carter is continually distracted by the adulterous activities of his wife, Ann (Michelle Phillips).

Angela lives in a lonely but surprisingly big apartment with only her cat for company. Her cat is named Midnight and he’s a black cat so he automatically became my favorite character in the film. Living next door to her are two twin brothers. Alex (Steve Railsback) is a soap opera star. Cole (Railsback, again) is an artist in a wheelchair who continually paints cartoonish pictures of Angela being attacked by a man with a big red beard.

Then, one day, Angela goes out to buy some scissors. When she returns and gets on the elevator to head back up to her apartment, she’s attacked by a man …. A MAN WITH A RED BEARD! Fortunately, Angela is able to stab him with her scissors. After the man with the red beard runs off, Angela is discovered in the elevator by Alex and Cole. Alex and Angela fall in love. Cole’s not too happy about that.

Following so far?

Angela get a call about a job interview, one that requires her to go to a stranger’s apartment. Despite the fact that the film has spent nearly an hour setting up Angela as being intensely agoraphobic, she has no problem going to this apartment. However, once she enters the apartment, she finds herself locked in! She also discovers that the red-bearded man is also in the apartment. Fortunately, he’s dead. Unfortunately, it appears that he was killed by Angela’s scissors. There’s also a raven in the apartment. The raven continually taunts Angela, saying, “You killed him!” Let’s just be happy that Edgar Allan Poe wasn’t around to see this.

Trapped in the apartment, Angela has flashbacks to her past. Is Angela the murderer? Is all of this just happening in her mind? Or is someone trying to drive her over the edge?

Though Scissors is set up as a psychological horror film, it’s really more of an extended acting exercise for Sharon Stone. Stone wanders around the apartment. She talks to herself. She had a nervous breakdown or two. She discusses life with a puppet. Every single scene seems to be designed to make audiences go, “Wow, she really can act!” but, despite all of the histrionics on display, Angela is still a very one note character. By making her obviously unstable from the start, the film doesn’t really leave the character with much room to develop or take us by surprise. The film attempts to end on a bit of an ambiguous note as far as Angela’s character is concerned but that type of ambiguity has to be earned. There’s nothing to Stone’s performance to indicate that there’s anything about Angela that isn’t totally on the surface. To suggest that there was more to her than originally appeared is to insult the audience’s ability to discern hidden depths.

The film does eventually wrap up its mystery and present a solution of sorts. Unfortunately, it’s a totally unsatisfying solution and one that’s dependent on otherwise intelligent people coming up with a ludicrously overcomplicated scheme to deal with one not particularly complicated problem. It’s all pretty forgettable but at least the cat survives.

Trapped (1973, directed by Frank De Felitta)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Chuck Brenner (James Brolin) is out shopping when he’s mugged and left unconscious in a men’s room stall.  By the time Chuck wakes up, the store is closed for the weekend and the place is deserted except for him and six doberman guard dogs.  The dogs are trained to hunt down and attack anyone who shouldn’t be in the store and, as far as they’re concerned, that includes Chuck.  Chuck now has to survive the night and try to figure out a way to get out of the store.  Not helping is that Chuck still hasn’t recovered from taking a blow to the head and he’s been bitten by one of the dogs, leaving a blood trail for them to follow.

This made-for-TV movie is a simple but effective thriller about an ordinary man trapped in an extremely dangerous situation.  Frank De Felitta (who would later direct one of my favorite made-for-tv horror film, The Dark Night of the Scarecrow) does a good job of creating suspense as Chuck tries to make it from one area of the department store to the next without getting attacked.  (One of the best scenes involves Chuck, dizzy because he has a concussion, jumping from one cabinet to another while the dogs wait below him.)  Even dog lovers will become nervous as the dobermans prowl the aisles, looking for their prey.  James Brolin gives a good everyman performance and he’s ably supported by Susan Clark as his ex-wife and Earl Holliman as Clark’s new husband.  The film is so well-executed that it was only after it ended that I started to wonder why any store would leave six dog unsupervised in their store overnight.  Just the effort that would have to be made to clean up after them would cancel out whatever money was being saved by not using a human security guard.

Trapped has been released under several titles, the best known of which is The Dobermn Patrol.  My personal favorite, though, is Danger Doberman!

Bubba’s Revenge: Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981, directed by Frank De Felitta)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Dude, this movie.

Charles Durning plays Otis P. Hazelrigg, a postman in a small town who has an unhealthy interest in a ten year-old girl named Marylee (Tanya Crowe).  When Marylee is mauled and nearly killed by a dog, Otis decides that she was attacked by Bubba Ritter (Larry Drake), a mentally challenged man who has the mind of a child.  With Otis and his redneck friends looking to lynch him, Bubba’s mother disguises him as a scarecrow and tells him to stand out in a field and not move.  When Otis and his friends discover Bubba hiding, they all shoot him until he’s dead.  Otis puts a pitchfork in Bubba’s hands and tells the police that Bubba was attacking them and they didn’t have any choice but to shoot him.

Otis thinks that he’s gotten away with murder but he’s wrong.  After Marylee sings a song in the same field where Bubba was killed, Otis’s friends start dying.  One is suffocated in a grain silo.  Another falls into a thresher.  Before each one dies, they report seeing a scarecrow on their property.  Otis thinks that Bubba’s mother is behind the murders but what if Bubba has actually come back to life?

Dark Night of the Scarecrow will mess up your mind, give you bad dreams, and leave you with a lifelong phobia o scarecrows.  It’s that scary.  I remember that they used to frequently show this movie on TV when I was  growing up and even the commercials were scary.  (The part of the movie that always messed with me were the shots of Bubba’s frightened eyes darting around underneath the scarecrow mask.)  Scarecrows are naturally creepy and the movie’s atmosphere is unsettling but the most frightening thing about Dark Night of the Scarecrow is Otis and the redneck lynch mob that he puts together.  Otis is a thoroughly loathsome character and Charles Durning goes all out playing him.  Otis is a civil servant, which gives him some prestige in the town but he uses that prestige to bully Bubba and harass Marylee.  His concern with Marylee especially feels wrong and the movie does not shy away from the subtext of his interest.  The scarecrow might frighten you but you will absolutely loathe Otis and everyone who follows him.

Dark Night of the Scarecrow was made for television but it’s just as good as any theatrical release.   It is also might be the first movie to feature a killer scarecrow.  Several have been made in the years since but Dark Night of the Scarecrow was the first and it’s still the best.

A Movie A Day #197: Scissors (1991, directed by Frank De Felitta)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

This is another dumb movie starring Sharon Stone.

In this one, Stone plays Angela Anderson.  Angela is a sexually repressed artist who is obsessed with scissors.  When she is attacked in an elevator by a man with a red beard, her neighbor, Alex (Steve Railsback), comes to her rescue.  Alex is an actor who lives with his twin brother, the bitter and wheelchair-bound Cole (Steve Railsback, again.)  When Angela finds herself locked in an apartment with a dead man (who has been stabbed with a pair of scissors and who has a red beard), who is responsible?  According to the dead man’s pet raven, it’s Angela.  But could it also have something to do with Angela’s obviously evil psychiatrist (Ronny Cox) and his politician wife (Michelle Phillips)?

This extremely ill-thought attempt at Hitchcockian suspense came out after Total Recall increased Sharon Stone’s profile but before Basic Instinct made her (briefly) a superstar.  Scissors, much like the later Intersection, is a film where Sharon Stone attempts to show that she has range by playing a frigid character.  Instead, Scissors just reveals how limited Sharon Stone’s range was.  For all of the film’s attempts to duplicate Repulsion, Stone is never believable as someone on the verge of losing her mind.  To her credit, Stone does try really hard, which is more than can be said for anyone else in the cast.  Railsback, normally a good actor, can barely summon up enough interest in the material to play one character, let alone two.  To buy what Scissors selling, it is necessary to believe that someone would come up with an elaborate scheme to drive Angela crazy but would still be careless enough to accidentally leave a door open at a key moment.

Dumb.  Just dumb.