Since the start of the pulp era, cults have been a popular subject. Usually dressed in red and concealing their faces behind hoods, cult members have menaced, tortured, and frightened. Luckily, there’s often a strong-jawed hero right around the corner to take them out and save the day.
Can you follow the plot of the 1963 horror film, The Terror?
If so, congratulations! You’ve accomplished something that even the people who made the film have admitted to being unable to do.
The film opens in 19th century Europe. Andre Duvalier is an earnest French soldier who has somehow gotten lost in Germany. Andre is played by a youngish, pre-stardom Jack Nicholson. Nicholson, that most contemporary, sarcastic, and American of actors, is thoroughly unconvincing as an idealistic Frenchman from 1806. Obviously unsure of what do with the character, Nicholson delivers his lines stiffly and does what he can to downplay the naturally sardonic sound of his voice. This is probably the only film where Jack Nicholson is a “nice young man.”
Andre meets a mysterious woman named Helene (played by Sandra Knight, who was Nicholson’s wife at the time). Helene appears to live in a castle with the Baron (Boris Karloff) and his servant, Stefan (Dick Miller, who makes no effort to come across as being, in anyway, European). However, Helene bears a distinct resemblance to the Baron’s long-dead wife, Ilse, who the Baron killed after discovering her with another man. However, a witch in the village claims that Ilse’s lover was her son so she put a curse on the Baron and the presence of Helene is a part of that curse. However, Stefan claims that the Baron isn’t actually the Baron and and that Ilse’s husband isn’t actually dead. However….
Yes, there’s a ton of plot twists in this movie, which is probably the result of the fact that the film was shot without a completed script. In fact, the only reason the movie was made was because Roger Corman had access to Boris Karloff and a castle set that he used for The Raven. When he discovered that he could use the set for two extra days, he shot some random footage with Boris Karloff and then he tried to build a movie around it. As a result, the cast and the directors largely made up the story as the filmed.
Yes, I said directors. While Corman shot the Karloff scenes, he no longer had enough money to use a union crew to shoot the rest of the film. Because Corman was a member of the DGA, he couldn’t direct a nonunion film. So, he assigned the rest of the film to one his assistants, an aspiring filmmaker named Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola shot the beach scenes and, in a sign of things to come, he went overbudget and got behind schedule. Coppola was meant to shoot for three days but instead went for eleven.
Though Coppola shot the majority of the film, he got a better job offer before he could do any reshoots. Coppola suggested that a friend of his from film school, Dennis Jakob, take over. Jakob shot for three days and reportedly used most of the time to shoot footage for his thesis movie.
Still feeling that the movie needed a few extra scenes to try to make sense of the plot, Corman then gave the film to Monte Hellman and, after Hellman got hired for another job, Jack Hill. Hellman would later go on to direct films like The Shooting and Two-Lane Blacktop. Jack Hill would later direct Spider Baby and several other exploitation films in the 70s. Reportedly, on the final day of shooting, even Jack Nicholson took some time behind the camera. It was Nicholson’s first directing job. (Nicholson, for his part, has often said that his original ambition in Hollywood was to become a director and not an actor.)
So, yes, the film’s a bit disjointed. The plot doesn’t make any sense. Nicholson shows little of his trademark charisma. But Dick Miller has a lot of fun as the duplicitous Stefan and Boris Karloff brings his weary dignity to the role of the Baron. Oddly, even though the Baron’s scene were shot before the script had even been written, they’re the ones that make the most sense. It’s a messy film but it plays out with a certain hallucinatory style. It’s a piece of Hollywood history and a testament to Roger Corman’s refusal to waste even two days of shooting. If you’ve got a star and a set for two days, you’ve got enough for a movie!
(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.
I was in Arkansas, looking for a certain grave, when I discovered that I was not alone. The deer stayed long enough for me to get a picture and then ran along. This picture is a reminder that there is beauty even among sadness.
Tonight, for our horror on the lens, we have the twentieth episode of the 2nd season of Friday the 13th: The Series!
In tonight’s episode, an obsessive weirdo named Howard (well-played by Martin Neufeld) uses a curse antique to try to get close to a rock star named Angelica (played by real-life rock star, Vanity).
This episode originally aired on May 1st, 1989. Happy May Day, I guess.
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 few years ago, I found a slightly beat-up copy of John Russo’s novelization of Night of the Living Dead at Half-Price Books. Of course, I immediately purchased it. From my own knowledge of the making of George Romero’s classic horror movie, I knew that John Russo was the one who came up with an idea involving zombies which led to Romero writing a story outline for Night of the Living Dead which Russo then turned into the film’s screenplay.
I also knew that Romero and Russo had a falling out of sorts after the success of Night of the Living Dead. With the film in the public domain as the result of a screw-up on the part of the movie’s distributor, there was some controversy over who had the rights to the original’s story. That’s one reason why the titles of Romero’s subsequent zombie films (i.e., Dawn of the Dead, Day ofthe Dead, Land of the Dead, and the rest) were all about “the Dead” as opposed to “the Living Dead.” Russo’s subsequent zombie-themed work (i.e. Return of the Living Dead) featured the term “Living Dead” and was also sold as a sequel to the original Night of the Living Dead.
Well, it turns out that novelization of Night of the Living Dead is pretty much a straight recreation of the film. We do learn a bit more about just how bad a relationship Barbara has with her brother Johnny. And it’s firmly established that Ben was a truck driver before the dead came back to life. Otherwise, it’s pretty much just the movie in novel form. We don’t learn much about the characters that we didn’t already know. Harry is still stubborn and cowardly. Ben is still the designated hero who manages to get everyone killed through his own stubbornness. Barbara is still catatonic for most of the book. (I know some would complain about Barbara being so passive but her stunned disbelief is perhaps the most realistic part of the film and the novel. That’s how most of us would react to going through what she’s just been through.) Russo is a good writer and he does a good job capturing the tension in that little house. The final few chapters — which recreate the film’s downbeat ending — are particularly well-done. But there’s not much in the book that isn’t also in the movie.
One interesting thing about the novelization is that it was originally published in 1974, six years after the release of Night of the Living Dead. Was it written in an attempt to help establish that Russo and/or Romero owned the rights to the film? Or did it just take the publisher that long to realize that they’re might be a market for a novel based on the film? Who knows?
The book doesn’t add much to the overall story but I’m still glad I’ve got a copy, You can never have enough Night of the LivingDead memorabilia.
In 1980, NBC adapted the Ray Bradbury short story collection, The Martian Chronicles, into a three-part miniseries. Though Bradbury’s original book featured short stories that were only loosely connected by two shared locations (Earth and Mars), the miniseries connected most of the stories through the character of Colonel John Wilder (Rock Hudson), the NASA project director who headed up the project to colonize Mars and who later regretted his decision after it became clear that humanity was going to treat Mars just as badly as they treated their previous home. The miniseries was adapted by Richard Matheson and directed by Michael Anderson.
Unfortunately, the miniseries itself was not a hit with critics, who complained that the story moved too slowly. Audiences, having just experienced Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, were not impressed with the special effects, in which miniatures were used to simulate spacecraft flying through space. Despite all of that, though, The Martian Chronicles has built up a cult following. I can remember first catching the miniseries playing late at night on one of the local station in Baltimore. I’ve always liked it. It’s not as good as Bradbury’s original collection, of course. But the miniseries still has its strengths, despite the miniatures.
The first and best episode of the miniseries was The Expeditions. Starting with a recreation of Viking 1 landing on Mars in 1976, the episode jumps forward to the far future of 1999! The first manned spacecraft lands on Mars and the two astronauts aboard are promptly killed by the first Martian that they meet, an angry husband who thinks that one of the astronauts is going to have an affair with his wife.
The second expedition is led by Captain Arthur Black (Nicholas Hammond, best-know for playing Spider-Man in the late 70s TV series). When they land on Mars, they discover that the formerly Red Planet now looks like Black’s childhood home of Green Bluff, Illinois. All of their relatives are waiting for them! Falling into the belief that they’ve returned to the past, the astronauts are killed by their “families” that night. It turns out that the Martians were using Black’s memories to set a trap for them. As the Martian who disguises himself as Black’s brother explains it, they’ve seen, in the minds of the astronauts, what the humans are doing to their own planet and they can’t allow that to happen to Mars. “Forgive us,” the Martians says, “we were once an honorable race.” In one of the best scenes in both the book and the miniseries, the Martians still have an Earth-style funeral for the men that they’ve killed because they too got sucked into the world that they created and came to care about the men they felt they had to kill.
Years later, a third expedition arrives. This one takes up the majority of the episode. It’s led by Colonel Wilder himself and includes Sam Parkhill (Darren McGavin), Jeff Spender (Bernie Casey), Briggs (John Cassady), and McClure (Peter Marinker). Almost all of the Martians have apparently died, the victims of the Earth germs that were brought to the planet by the second expedition. While Parkhill plots to open a barbecue joint and Briggs gets drunk and tosses his empty beer cans into a waterway that he christens, “Biggs Canal,” Spender investigates a deserted Martian city. Unlike the others, Spender is in awe of the Martian civilization and angry that it’s been so casually destroyed. When Spender returns, he declares himself to be “the last Martian” and tries to kill the members of the expedition.
Of the three episodes, The Expeditions is the one that sticks closest to the stories on which it was based, in both content and theme. Not surprisingly, it’s also the best of the miniseries, with each vignette working as both a separate story and a part of a larger whole. It’s the episode that sticks closest to what Bradbuy himself was going for in his original collection. While the miniature spaceships are a distraction, the desolate Martian landscape is sharply realized and the first episode is full of striking shots, from the Martian husband walking through the red desert to “greet” the first expedition to the funeral for the second expedition to the final battle between Spender and the survivors of the third expedition. Among the members of the cast, Nicholas Hammond and Bernie Casey are the stand-outs but everyone plays their part well. Darren McGavin is always a welcome presece in any miniseries and John Cassady is so obnoxious as Briggs that it’s impossible not to see where Spender is coming from. (Back when the IMDb still has message boards, every message on Cassady’s board was someone posting about Briggs Canal.) Rock Hudson is as stiff as ever but it’s appropriate for his character. The scene where he and Bernie Casey debate whether humanity is worthy of a planet like Mars is well-acted by both actors, with the different opinions of their characters reflected in the different performing styles of the two actors. Though the miniseries never explicitly states it, it is perhaps not a coincidence that Spender, as the only black character in the miniseries, is the only one to truly understand what humans colonizing Mars could lead to.
The Expeditions ends with Spender warning that humans will destroy Mars if they’re allowed to colonize it. The next episode would explore whether he was correct. We’ll take a look at The Settlers tomorrow.
Through the Shattered Lens 