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 lets the visuals do the talking.
Earlier today, I reviewed Terror Train, a horror film set on a train. There’s actually be quite a few horror films set on trains. In fact, there’s been so many that’s it’s the topic of today’s 4 Shots from 4 Films!
4 Shots From 4 Train-Set Horror Films
Horror Express (1972, dir by Eugenio Martin)
Terror Train (1980, dir by Roger Spottiswoode)
The Midnight Meat Train (2008, dir by Ryuhei Kitamura)
How else do you explain the prank that begins the 1980 slasher film, Terror Train? At a party, awkward pledge Kenny (Derek MacKinnon) is told that Alana Maxwell (Jamie Lee Curtis) is waiting for him in an upstairs bedroom and she totally wants to have sex with him! Poor Kenny. Really, he should have been able to figure that this was a prank but I guess he’s just naive. Anyway, he goes upstairs, strips down to his underwear, and listens as Alana says, “Don’t be shy …. kiss me!”
Kenny thinks that Alana is waiting for him in the bed but actually, she’s hiding behind a curtain. So, what’s in the bed? Well, as Kenny soon discovers, it’s a limbless corpse! Oh, those wacky pre-med students! Under the direction of Doc (Hart Bochner), they’ve stolen a cadaver from the medical school and they’ve used it to play the joke of the century! Everyone bursts into the room, laughing.
Ha ha! Funny joke, right?
Well, not to Kenny. Kenny totally freaks out and starts spinning around and gets all wrapped up in the sheets. Needless to say, Kenny does not get laid that night.
In fact, Kenny ends up losing his mind. And that’s unfortunate but, as they say, life goes on. Three years later, the pranksters are all due to graduate so they’re going to throw a costume party on a train! The conductor (Ben Johnson) watches as these rich, costumed college kids get on his train and you can just tell that he’s thinking, “There better not be no funny business.” He need not worry! Alana is on the train and she still feels so bad over what happened to Kenny that you can be sure that there won’t be any pranks during this graduation party!
Unfortunately for everyone else, Kenny’s decided to get on the train as well. While his former classmates are smoking weed, getting drunk, dancing to the best disco music of 1980, and taunting a magician (David Copperfield), Kenny is killing people and stealing their costumes.
Kenny’s first victim actually dies before the train leaves. When he comes staggering up to everyone with a sword sticking out of him, everyone assumes that it’s just another joke. Nope! Turns out the sword is real but everyone’s too busy boarding to notice as the guy collapses to the ground and is promptly dragged underneath the train. In a scene that always makes me cringe, the train slowly crushes him as it starts to move forward. I mean, seriously …. Agck!
So, now Kenny is wandering around the train, dressed like Grouch Marx and killing people. It takes people a while to notice because we’re not exactly dealing with the smartest group of college graduates. And, once they do realize …. well, what are they going to do? They’re stuck on a train in the middle of nowhere! Even if they do get off the train, it’s snowing and below freezing outside! I mean, it’s almost as bad as Minnesota in January out there….
Of the many slasher films that Jamie Lee Curtis appeared in after Halloween, Terror Train is definitely the best. After making his directorial debut here, Roger Spottiswoode went on to become one of the busiest directors in Hollywood and you can tell why when you watch this movie. Spottiswoode’s makes great and atmospheric use of the train and Kenny’s habit of constantly changing his costume keeps you guessing just where he might be at any given time. Even more importantly, Spottiswoode takes the time to develop the characters so that they become more than just cardboard victims. Jamie Lee Curtis, Hart Bochner, Sandee Curris, and Timothy Webber all give excellent performance as the objects of Kenny’s wrath while old veteran Ben Johnson brings some gravitas to the film as the wise conductor.
(My only objection is that the worst of the pranksters is named Doc, which happens to be the name of our cat. And let me just say that Doc the cat would never pull as cruel a prank as Doc the medical student.)
As we all know, Jamie Lee Curtis will be returning to the horror genre later this month. She’ll be playing Laurie Strode in David Gordon Green’s Halloween remake or reboot or sequel or whatever it is. Famously, Curtis refused to appear in horror films for several years, saying that she didn’t want to be typecast. That was understandable on her part and, as much as I love horror movies, it was probably a smart career move. That said, the slasher films that Curtis appeared are some of the best of the genre. Halloween, Terror Train, and even Prom Night are all classics of their kind. Terror Train is a suspense masterpiece, perfect for any cold and snowy night when you want to scream a little.
For today’s horror on the lens, we have 1939’s The Hound of the Baskervilles!
Based, of course, on the novel by Arthur Conan Doyle, The House of the Baskervilles is well-remembered for being the first of many Sherlock Holmes films to star Basil Rathbone as the detective and Nigel Bruce as his loyal sidekick, Dr. Watson. Interestingly enough, Holmes is absent for a good deal of the film, leaving it up to Watson to do the majority of the investigating. That said, you can still see why Rathbone’s interpretation of the character proved to be so popular that he would go on to play Holmes in a total of 14 movies and one radio series.
On tonight’s episode of Kolchak, Carl investigates a series of mysterious thefts which could very well be connected to a series of mysterious murders.
Needless to say, it’s all very mysterious.
Kolchak is often cited as having been an influence on The X-Files and you can certainly see why in this episode. While I don’t want to spoil the nature of this episode’s monster, I will say that this episode will be enjoyed by conspiracy fans everywhere.
You know who I’m talking about, of course. She’s usually the only person in her circle of friends who isn’t sexually active, who doesn’t drink, and who doesn’t do drugs. She’s usually studious and responsible and it’s usually said that she’s so mature and smart that guys are scared to ask her out. While that may sound like kind of a boring life for a teenager to lead, it also means that there’s nothing around to distract her once the killer shows up. While all of her friends are too drunk, stoned, or naked to escape, the final girl is the one who not only outruns the killer but who occasionally beats his head in as well.
Every slasher film has a final girl but few of them ever really seem to concern themselves with what’s going to happen to her after the end credits roll. (Usually, if there is a sequel, we find out that the final girl died mysteriously a few months after surviving the previous massacre.) It’s only logical that having all of your friends killed over the course of one night would not necessarily leave you in a good place emotionally.
The 2015 horror film Last Girl Standing answers the question, “What happens after the horror movie ends?” In the opening scenes, we find Camryn (Akasha Villalobos) in a very familiar situation. She’s running around the woods. She’s stumbling across the bodies of all of her dead friends. She’s being pursued by a man wearing a deer mask. The man is known as The Hunter and when Camryn finally manages to turn the tables on him, we have reached the point where most slasher films would end.
However, this is right where Last Girl Standing begins.
Two years later and Camryn is still struggling to recover from the night. She’s haunted by nightmares and sometimes, she even has visions of the Hunter stalking her. She’s gotten a job working in a laundromat and her co-workers seem nice but are they? It seems like everyone Camryn meets either asks her about that terrible night or they’re scared to get too close to her, as if she carries bad luck or they’re afraid that the Hunter’s insanity has somehow been transferred to her.
For her part, Camryn worries that someone might be stalking her and it doesn’t help her paranoia when Nick (Brian Villalobos) starts working at the laundromat. Again, Nick seems friendly but is he? Can Camryn ever trust anyone again? Even more importantly, should she ever trust anyone again? As most things do, it all ends in blood and tragedy.
Last Girl Standing is an interesting hybrid of a film. On the one hand, based on the film’s opening and its final scenes, Last Girl Standing is definitely a horror film. And yet, the middle part of the film is far more concerned with examining the life of someone struggling with PTSD than with providing the usual jump scares. While the film’s premise might sound like the setup for a typical slasher film, Last Girl Standing is ultimately more about how we deal with trauma. Akasha Villalobos gives a sensitive and empathetic performance as Camryn and the entire cast of this low-budget film does a good job of grounding this story in reality.
All in all, Last Girl Standing is a worthwhile film for those of us who have wondered what happens after the final credits roll.
In 1957, the citizens of the town of Moorheigh discovered that their local doctor was doing experiments on his patients, removing their hearts and using them to try to bring his dead wife back to life. The townspeople responded by executing Dr. Rendell and chanting a poem that goes, “This town has a doctor named Rendell/Stay away from his house because he’s the doctor from Hell.” They would have killed Dr. Rendell’s son too, except that Evan, Jr. escaped by sewing himself up in his mother’s corpse and then later using a scalpel to cut his way out.
Thirty-five years later, Evan, Jr. (Larry Drake) returns to Moorheigh, looking to get revenge on the town. Because of his evil laugh, he is now known as Dr. Giggles and he has a medical-related one liner for every occasion. When Dr. Giggles learns that Jennifer (Holly Marie Combs) needs a heart monitor, Dr. Giggles decides to stalk her while killing all of her interchangeable friends. Dr. Giggles says that he wants to give her a new heart, preferably one that he’s ripped out of someone else’s body. Jennifer is not very appreciative.
Dr. Giggles was meant to be a franchise started, in the fashion of the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th films. It was a franchise that would never be because there wasn’t much that could be done with Dr. Giggles that wasn’t done during the first film. Larry Drake was a good actor but, other than the scene where he used a scalpel to cut himself out of a dead body, there was nothing about Dr. Giggles that distinguished from all the other horror movie slasher. He wasn’t a dream weaver like Freddy or indestructible like Jason. He was just a dude dressed like a doctor who giggled too much.
For a better film featuring Larry Drake as a villain, do yourself a favor and watch Sam Raimi’s Darkman.
Since today is October 13th, I figured that today’s horror scene of the day should be one of the best endings ever!
I’m talking, of course, about the ending of 1980’s Friday the 13th. You can say what you want about the rest of the film (though, personally, I think the film’s underrated) but the ending is brilliant. No, it doesn’t really make much sense, both in the context of the film and in the Jason-dominated sequels that followed. That’s probably because the ending was a last-minute addition. It wasn’t designed to make sense. It was designed to make audiences scream and hopefully set the groundwork for a sequel.
But no matter! I still love everything about this scene. I love how thing sopen with that serene lake. I love the calming music in the background. I love the feeling that everything’s going to be safe. And then suddenly …. AGCK! It may not be as effective today because we all know it’s going to happen but I bet this scared the Hell out of people back in 1980.
A few years ago, when I reviewed the entire Friday the 13th film franchise for this site, one of the main resources that I used in my research was the 2006 book, Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th.
As you can probably guess from the title, the book is a nearly complete history of the Friday the 13th franchise. (I say nearly complete because the book was published to coincide with the release of Freddy vs. Jason so there’s no information about the later reboot. That’s okay, though, because the reboot sucks and deserves to be forgotten.) What sets this book apart is that it’s an oral history so you’re learning about the history of the Friday the 13th films from the people who were actually involved.
It makes for compelling and interesting reading, providing a portrait not just of the franchise but also of what it was like to be involved in the world of low-budget, genre film making. Friday the 13th may have started out as an independent American giallo just to then become a studio slasher franchise but the one thing that remained consistent was that, no matter how much money the films made, they weren’t ever given much respect. One of the recurring themes in the book is that the actors who were cast in the films were often happy for the work but it was rare that getting killed in a Friday the 13th film ever led to stardom. (Kevin Bacon, of course, is the exception to that rule. Though Bacon isn’t interviewed in the book, everyone who worked on the first film seems to agree that he was fun to work with.) Some of the actors interviewed are just happy to have been a part of an iconic franchise. Some of them display a commendable sense of humor while other seem rather annoyed to know that they’ll be forever associated with Friday the 13th. Some, like New Beginning‘s Jerry Pavlon, worry about the franchise’s subtext while actress Barbara Howard jokes that she calls her annual Final Chapter residual check her “blood money.”
Another recurring theme in Crystal Lake Memories is that of the bitter screenwriter. For the most part, the people assigned to write the scripts for these films come across as being a uniformly bitter lot. It’s actually understandable, as the majority of them attempted to add a new twist to the franchise just to be told that the studio just wanted more scenes of Jason killing camp counselors. That gets at a larger frustration shared by almost everyone interviewed. How do you add your own personal touch to a set of films that are specifically designed to be as impersonal as possible? That’s the question that everyone involved with the franchise had to answer for themselves and it makes for an interesting and relatable read.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the book deals with the lengthy development of the Freddy vs. Jason film. We’re told that one of the executives involved with the film believed that, if she added an environmental subtext to the story, Freddy vs. Jason would be the first slasher film to win an Academy Award. As for the films themselves, it sounds like Friday The 13th: A New Beginning had the most out-of-control set while Friday the 13th Part 2 was the fun set. The set I would have wanted to avoid would have been Friday the 13th 3D, where everyone was apparently too stressed out over the special effects to actually have any fun.
This book is a must not just for Friday the 13th fans but for movie lovers in general.
Like many Italian horror films, Mario Bava’s 1971 film, Bay of Blood, is known by many different names.
The original Italian title, or at least one of them, was Ecologia del delitto, which roughly translates to Ecology of Crime. That may sound a little dry to our English-speaking ears but it’s actually a totally appropriate title. The film is about a series of crimes, all inspired by greed and the desire to take control of a bayside mansion.
The film was also called Reazione a catena, which translates to Chain Reaction. Again, that may sound a bit bland but it’s a totally appropriate title. This film takes the concept of a chain reaction to its logical extreme. Everyone in the film wants control of the bay and everyone is willing to kill to do it. One person murders someone just to get murdered themselves. As dark as that may sound, this film actually finds Bava in a rather playful mood. Bava’s direction is wonderfully self-aware and totally cognizant of how absurd the film’s plot occasionally is. It all ends with a perfectly sardonic little twist, one that not only feels earned but which perfectly epitomizes the film’s darkly humorous worldview.
When the film was released in the UK and the United States it was given several different titles. (At one point, in the United States, it was actually sold as being a sequel to Wes Craven’s Last House On The Left, which it definitely was not.) One title was Carnage. Another was Blood Bath. Again, bland titles but totally appropriate to the film. Over the course of the film’s 84-minute running time, 14 people are murdered. With the exception of two innocent bystanders and four teenagers who made the mistake of trying to party in the murder mansion, they were all bad. Still, fourteen is a lot of carnage.
In fact, Bava’s film would later be cited as one of the first slasher films. That’s true, though this film has considerably going on beneath the surface than the average slasher film. If the average slasher often can be defined by sex=death, Bava’s film can be defined as greed=death. That said, several of this film’s murders were “borrowed’ by the early installments of the Friday the 13th franchise. Remember that double impalement from Friday the 13th Part 2? It was taken, almost shot-for-shot, from Bava’s film.
My favorite title for Bava’s film was Twitch of the Death Nerve, which is just so wonderfully over-the-top and melodramatic. It’s the title that most captures the film’s combination of blood and satire. If I was solely in charge of picking the film’s official title, I would have selected Twitch of the Death Nerve.
However, the official title of Bava’s film appears to be Bay of Blood and I guess that’s an okay title. I mean, it’s appropriate. A lot of blood is spilled in that bay, starting with Countess Federica (Isa Miranda) and then going on to include the majority of her family members and business associates. The film opens with Federica’s murder and then doesn’t waste any time in revealing that Federica was murdered by her husband, Filippo (Giovanni Nuvoletti). Filippo murdered his wife on behalf of her estate agent, Frank (Chris Avram) and now, Frank just needs Filippo to sign the property over to him. Of course, what Frank doesn’t realize is that Filippo was murdered just minutes after he murdered Federica….
And that’s just the start.
Bay of Blood is one of Mario Bava’s best films, featuring a cast of wonderfully sordid characters and grisly murders. The film itself becomes a bit of a black comedy, as one murder leads to another. Bava directs with his usual bravura sense of style, making the bay both beautiful and menacing at the same time. If you want to know why almost every horror film made since 1970 owes a debt of gratitude to Bava, Bay of Blood is a good place to start.
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 lets the visuals do the talking.
Since I reviewed A Nightmare on Elm Street earlier today, it just feels right to do….
4 Shots From 4 Nightmarish Films
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, dir by Wes Craven)
A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3: Dream Warriors (1987, dir by Chuck Russell)
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988, dir by Renny Harlin)
Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991, dir by Rachel Talalay)
Through the Shattered Lens 